Western Digital Green WD40EZRX 4TB Internal SATA 3.5inch HardDrive

I am using this drive as part of my backup system. I have a set of drives I use in a rotation where different week s different drives get used. There is space on this drive to get a big set of my data on, the data that changes regularly, together with a complete backup of my operating system drive. I have six hard drives of different sizes and types in my PC to make 10TB and 4 x 2TB drives in an 8TB NAS RAID unit, so there is a fair bit of data to watch. We get a lot of power problems in our house with power cuts and spikes on the mains, so combined with backup drives like this, a set of UPS power cleaning and battery backup devices, 4TB of data storage in the form of drives like this in their own USB3 external cases form the backbone of my hardware protection.This drive has fitted in well with my backup system. I have not tested it's read/write speeds, but in the USB3 external case it works well. I will most likely be getting more.

This is an excellent hard drive as far as I can tell so far. I installed it in a new system as a data drive and I am using it to storing media for streaming over my home network. The packaging wasn't great but it doesn't appear to be damaged.I have Acronis Disk Monitor installed and I noticed that the load/unload cycles were unusually high (2300) after just 52 hours of operation compared to the WD Black 500GB drive (30) that I use as a boot drive. I looked this up on the internet and apparently this is an intentional "feature" and Western Digital claim there is no correlation between HD failure and load/unload cycles. The WD Green drives are set to idle after just 8 seconds of inactivity which is what is creating such a large number of load/unload cycles while streaming media. You can use the wdidle3.exe program to disable or change the idle time to a maximum of 300 seconds which was what I did. There are a number of guides available freely on how to do this so I won't explain further. Synology recommend that you change the idle timer if you use one of these drives in their NAS devices and I imagine this applies to other NAS devices and people who use the drive to stream media.

I have several of these drives, they are awesome, fast and power efficient and they work well in yachts! They are designed for handling huge amounts of data but not for intensive heavy file I/O operations, therefore, brilliant as a second drive in your PC for your music or film library. For intense spooling, virtual memory, thousands of successive read/writes etc (ie your drive C in Windows), you should be buying the Western Digital BLACK.As with ALL 4TB drives, if you want to boot your PC from it and you want it to be 4TB (and not 2 x 2TB drives), you will need to be an IT guru to achieve this and have Win 64/64 bit motherboard/UEFI bios etc.For some reason, Amazon as a supplier cannot package and ship 'bare chassis equipment' (ie something that does not come in a manufacturers box), I never received mine and although I cannot fault Amazons after sales, we both wasted a huge amount of time and money trying to resolve the issue and in the end I got my money back.

I'm writing a belated review of these drives as I've just removed one from my Synology NAS not because there is anything wrong with it, but because quite simply I've run out of space. I've had four of these drives sitting in a NAS running constantly for five years. I originally purchased the drive in 2015 for £109 and I've had trouble-free operation since. I back up photos and work, along with music and movies and the data landscape is constantly changing but not once have I had a report of a bad sector or corrupt data nor have I heard or been troubled by the drive in operation. If you're looking for a an expansive drive that won't let you down, this is a great piece of kit.

Beware of recertified drives. These can be identified by an alphabetic character after the product date and have a six month warranty instead of 2/3 year (oem/retail). I was fobbed off by the seller 'CableComs' with 4 of these and have had to return them immediately.Thus I cannot accurately rate the drive itself, but still have faith in the WD Green series due to others I own of lower capacity.

My second one - great price but what is different is the Amazon packaging. Looks like they have listened to their customers. It cam in a perfect small package lined with foam and fitted it perfectly. WD are the business - great drive.EDIT Purchased on 15 July 2015 now 19th June 2017. I have not used it hardly at all - I just store photos and videos etc which are rarely accessed. Today - started my machine and my Asus BIOS informed me of S.M.A.R.T. error on the drive. Managed to get booted into Windows (Boot Drive is SSD). Windows prompting me to back up the files on that drive, 'Hard Dick Sentinnel' informing of imminent drive failure, 'Failure Predicted' Errors occurred while reading raw data from disk indicates problem with disk surface.FURTHER EDITTried to get support from Western Digital - put serial number in and it said it was 'OEM' and to go back to supplier. I thought 'oh well! that's money down the drain.' Then, on the off chance I decided to contact Amazon. Big surprise for me here - no messing about and as always - superb support. They said this is unacceptable and immediately refunded my money and sent me a free postage return label, and said that they would take it up with the manufacturer. That is top class support after having owned it for nearly two years.

I have bought WD hard drives from Amazon many many times. However, when I bought 2 of these and registered them with WD, they say they are OUT OF REGION. This means there is absolutely no WD warranty on these drives. Nowhere in the item description does it say this.I have contacted WD to see if they can simply transfer the warranty for me, but I doubt they will. If they can't, these drives are going straight back to Amazon.