Hello Western Digital team and community,
I wanted to share a real-world long-term experience with two WD Red 4TB drives (WD40EFRX) that I’ve been using in a home NAS setup.
Both drives were manufactured in mid-2014 (June and July) and have been in service ever since. Today, in 2026, they are still fully operational and report a completely clean SMART status.
Here are the key statistics:
Drive 1
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Power-on hours: ~90,009 hours
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Reallocated sectors: 0
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Pending sectors: 0
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Uncorrectable sectors: 0
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SMART status: PASSED
Drive 2
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Power-on hours: ~84,575 hours
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Reallocated sectors: 0
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Pending sectors: 0
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Uncorrectable sectors: 0
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SMART status: PASSED
Combined usage
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Over 174,000 power-on hours of real-world operation
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Zero media degradation indicators across both drives
Both drives have never been used in RAID. Instead, they were operated in a simple backup-oriented setup using rsync, running under OpenMediaVault throughout their entire lifecycle.
Over the years, this system has migrated across three different enclosures:
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Fractal Design Node 304
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Nox Coolbay VX Red Devil
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Jonsbo N3 (current enclosure)
Despite these hardware changes, the drives themselves have remained constant and have continued to perform flawlessly in all environments.
They have always been operated in a well-ventilated setup with stable temperatures (typically around 33–36°C).
What impresses me most is not just that the drives are still functioning, but that both of them remain completely clean according to SMART data after more than a decade of real-world NAS usage.
I thought this might be interesting to share as a genuine long-term reliability case of the WD Red series in a home storage environment.
I’ve attached SMART reports and a photo of both drives for reference.
Thank you for building hardware that has clearly stood the test of time.
Kind regards,
Rui Castro
