I bought a brand new Synology disk station and one WD RED 3TB (WD30EFRX). A drive with production date February 2014. It crashed after 3 weeks! The Synology tools didn’t provide much help to backup any files but by connecting the device to a spare SATA port in my old desktop I was able to retrieve most of my files. Though the state of the files is questionable by getting them from a drive with bad sectors. Great activity for an Easter weekend. Thanks WD!
Running the Data Lifeguard tools on Windows confirmed the failure: ‘Too many bad sectors detected’.
To get my Synology back working during the RMA period I ordered another WD Red 3 TB.
This drive is still working (fingers crossed).
In return of the RMA I received a new WD Red drive, production date April 2014. This drive was typed WD30EFRX but didn’t contain the typical Red label. Also the NASware version was 1.0 while the older drive had NASware version 2.0, isn’t that strange… I mounted this drive into my Synology and - surprise surprise - it crashed within a week!
In the meantime I have read a lot of bad stories about WD Red drives. A frequently used comment is that ‘there were some issues with the first generation’. Well my drives are clearly not of the first generation, but the fact is that 2 out of 3 WD Reds already have crashed!
WTH is wrong with these drives???
My experience with WD drives goes back almost twenty years, and until now I was pretty comfortable with them. However at this point I don’t have any confidence in WD Red disks at all, and I became suspicious for any WD product. I think this $300 investment for two WD30EFRX is the worst investment I did in years.
