Prior to the month or so I have had these drives, I had never had the opportunity to test helium technology. With the launch of the 8TB Red, WD has seemingly stabilized the platform enough to trust it out in the wild with consumers and in introducing this with the NASware 3.0 platform, consumers do...

I bought 3 of these to put into an external USB 3.0 enclosure to run Windows Storage Spaces in parity mode. Installation & operation has been effortless. Before loading files I ran WD's comprehensive surface test...no flaws. I'm storing media files..

Plug & play

Wish they were cheaper

I needed a good, reliable and spacious drive for backup of my media. My previous drive died and took my data with it. Fortunately, I backed it up to tape before it stopped working. I had purchased WD drives before, and knew their reputation for quality and longevity.

The hard drive works ok but I agree with many other people that is a little bit noisy. I can't judge speed wise or lifespan yet but I will update as soon as I have more information. The noise is only produced when working so unless it's in your bedroom it's good

Better, reliable and good speed. Longer warranty period.

Faster than Seagate 8TB Archive HDD Helium filled; for lower work temperatures Good for NAS and Desktop use Hitachi Quality! (HGST

If it crashed then difficult restore data from it

Works well in a synology NAS. I have 3 western digital red drives of various sizes in NASes. I like to have a mix of drives and drive manufacturers, and these REDs keep running for years without issues.

I run two WHS2011 servers each with 17GB onboard and progressively upgrading storage space. Currently have one of these drives in each server and they have been great. Fully intend to replace smaller drives with these over time.

Paired it with a DiskStation DS216+II, makes 30-50 mbps on gigabit ethernet. You will trade speed for energy consumption and less sound than a 7200 rpm drive.

Bought a pair of these to upgrade my RAID array from 2TB. They are only 5400 RPM so the transfer speeds aren't that impressive (only a pain when moving data to the array) but they run cool and quiet.

-Runs cool and quiet; -Decent performance; -Fast RAID rebuild time

Pricing

This seems to be a pretty good deal for a fairly good amount of space. Sure it spins, but heck I can't even imagine how expensive a SSD would be for this size.