Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

So WD apparently has no ability to perform the most basic configuration management at their factories. Once again the "load cycle count" issue has returned to their line of drives. If you don't know what this is you can Google, but basically the drive repeatedly parks the drive heads, thousands of times a day, because of an improper firmware setting on the drive. The drives are only rated to 600,000 load cycles and with them ticking of once every few seconds the drive will exceed its rating in less than a year. This can be corrected by the user but it is a pain and requires you have certain hardware/software to do. Probably beyond most users. Exchanging the drive may or may not help because you have no idea if the next drive will have the same erroneous setting. This has happened many times in the past few years, check the reviews for this and other WD drives. WD acknowledges this is the incorrect setting as do many NAS vendors that recommend these drives. And yet, WD can't seem to help itself from setting the IDLE3 parameter wrong every few months. This is a sign that they simply are unable to perform basic configuration management in their production facilities. If you can't manage that you don't belong in the HD business. For reference, Google WDIDLE3 for how to fix this problem - but you better have a machine you can boot to a DOS image in order to use it. Alternatively return your WD drive and buy the equivalent Seagate drive instead. They have a nice NAS ready drive equivalent to the WD Red and they know how to set IDLE3 correctly.