Please read the following article/benchmarks regarding the real technical 'beef' on the WD Red drives : WD Red Tech Review

I remain convinced that WD Red drives are a good fit for a home audio enthusiast who requires a large amount of home NAS storage for his ZFS and/or Linux MD servers.

Out of my 24 3TB drives , only about 4 are Red drives. None have failed so far. (touch wood). I am in the process of migrating my RAIDz1 backups to 6x3TB RAIDz2 backups. primary is already 6x3TB RAIDz2 (with SSD ARC cache for speedup).

Other than the longer warranty, is the lack of aggressive head parking and the TLER configurability. Remember most of home enthusiasts are not springing for the 2X enterprise drives anyway.


Primary: 818v3+ID41, M6 stereo pair, M SpeakerLink cabling, Sonos+96kHz Cullen, silver DSW
HT: Marantz prepro, 271, DSP3300, 8K SE FL/FR pair, DSP M6x2, DSP320x4 (ceiling), black DSW, 520 RL/RR rear in-walls
Living Room: G65, 640 L/R in-walls, UHD722, MS600
Vac. Home: G61, HD621, 4xDSP3100, DSP3100HC
MDMS:NUC/ROCK+TrueNAS Core 12.0 ZFS file server