Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This particular model (WD60EFAX) WD Red 6 TB uses a recording technology called SMR. You can look up specifics about SMR hard drives online but one known issue with using this tech is that drives tend to suffer in data write performance. Using these drives in a parity based RAID (RAID 5, for example) results in very slow initialization, rebuild, and general write speeds which results in an array taking 5-10 times longer to perform operations where data is being written; along with a much higher likeliness of the controller dropping the drive or even other non-SMR drives in the array because of timeouts. I’ve experienced all of these issues in my RAID arrays, in mixed SMR and non-SMR (PMR) arrays and even more so with all-SMR drive arrays. To make matters worse, WD does not advertise this as an SMR drive or list it in any spec sheet. And while SMR isn't necessarily a bad thing, it does not perform well for parity based RAID or any sort of frequent or heavy write operations which is very common in “NAS” environments this drive is supposedly labeled for. SMR is an important fact and absolutely needs to be considered when purchasing a drive. The fact that WD doesn't list this specification is a form of false advertising as far as I’m concerned. There is no easy way to determine for sure if WD's drives use SMR or not without having the serial number and asking support. Even if you do ask there is no guarantee they will give you the information. I only discovered that this drive uses SMR because I was having issues with them, so I decided to go read more online reviews of it. In some reviews, some people recommended looking at Synology's hard drive compatibility chart. Though you can't guarantee that is an accurate way to determine if a drive is SMR or not, it did say that this drive is SMR. So their compatibility chart is at least a place to start, especially if you are researching a drive before buying it. So in the end, I can't recommend this drive for anything other than non parity RAID setups, and mostly-read environments, or archival storage where you simply write the data then leave it for months or years. I really hope WD will decide to start adding whether or not their drives use SMR on the product description and spec sheets. SMR isn’t inherently bad, it is just not good for parity-based RAID or write-intensive usage scenarios – so the WD60EFAX drive isn’t good for those scenarios either.