WD Red Plus 8TB NAS HDD

I hate to review components like these until I've had them a long time, but now is probably the time for harddrive buying in general. First of all, to those who are wondering, no the 5640 RPM is not a typo. The official specs sheet says that's what it runs at. I think this helps it find a better balance between 5400 RPM power efficiency and 7200 RPM responsiveness. It claims to run cool and it does seem to do so. One lucky surprise is that it's quiet. A lot of larger harddrives intended for NAS or other RAID systems don't really try to be that quiet. According to the spec sheet it's officially 24dBA idle, 28dBA access. That's insane. I can't measure it with digital precision, but I can say it's one of the least annoying sounding drives I have used in a long time. Even many 5400 RPM 2.5" harddrives bother my ears these days (SSDs have spoiled me!) It doesn't seem to have quite the same "whoosh" sound of the actual platters spinning that normally bothers me if a drive is at all close enough to hear. (How did I survive harddrives in the 90s??? I don't know!) This thing is almost whisper quiet and putting my ear right up to it can still make it hard to hear. I think maybe the 5640 RPM contributes to this — likely it strikes a better balance in regards to sonic properties. My best guess is vibrations don't interfere with each other as much or something to that effect. And even the "grinding" when it's accessing data is quieter than most. I went ahead and wrote this review now in part because I just really want to emphasize how much quieter this drive is compared to most. As another piece of good news, this entire series is made with CMR — that is classic magnetic recording — rather than SMR (shingled magnetic recording.) A lot of larger drives in this sort of range use SMR because it's cheaper, but it also is significantly slower on any writes bigger than the cache size — which is probably going to be any decent sized transfers at all. I also see a lot of claims that SMR drives last significantly less actual usage hours (which might make sense since they must rewrite every single block that changes for even a small write.) Right now I have more confidence in a CMR drive to hold up past the 1.5 year mark that seems to come up a lot in reviews and complaints for SMR drives. Speeds did dip down to something like 160MB/s for the final average (instead of the 215MB/s in the specs) for a huge transfer operation, but all in all this drive strikes a lot of great balances. Only time will tell on reliability, but this is a good line.

Joshua · 2026-03-05 · via amazon

Solid, reliable hard drives for a NAS or PC, easy installation just plug it in, format and use!

Amazonaholic · 2026-05-13 · via amazon

I bought two of these to install in my DAS enclosure. One worked great and the other was DOA. I've bought 3 Blacks, 1 Purple in the past and now these 2 Reds and of the 6 total only 1 was DOA. Amazon's return is the best and having a Whole Foods near by makes it is easy to send things back. I wanted a DAS to save important files and needed two drives to mirror everything. I always go with Western Digital when it comes to mechanical drives and they work great if not DOA. They sit silent in my DAS until I accesses a file on them and I can hear them spin up. I have used this brand for many years and I am confident they will last a long time.

Amazon Customer · 2026-04-04 · via amazon

When I received the item the seal on the box was cut open. The plastic package that the drive is in, inside the box, was also slit open. I did not receive a new item. When I plugged the drive in the disk did not spin up and the drive was not recognized. I have another WD Red Plus that is 8TB and my computer has no problem recognizing that drive as soon as I plug it into my drive reader. I can also hear the disk spinning in the 8TB where as in the 6TB I don't hear anything. It's a defective item that was probably returned prior and they just sent it to me claiming it was brand new. The photo is a picture of the item as soon as I pulled it out of the box before I even tried to see if it would work.

LK · 2026-03-05 · via amazon

Delivered in original packaging and working good in a raid 1. Best in this price.

Otar Onashvili · 2026-04-23 · via amazon

Best Buy

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MSI

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Newegg (Open Box)

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VALUE SCORE

Cap

128

Read

550MB/s

Type

NVMe

Cap

128

Read

550MB/s

Type

NVMe