WD Red 3TB NAS Hard Drive - 5400 RPM

May 2014 - I forgot to update this, so I'm doing it almost a year later. Down graded to one star. TLDR - Amazon was great, however, 4 drives (two sets of two) failed in 24 hours. Extensive conversations with WD second level support resulting in them saying "return the drives", so I bought 3TB green drives again for the external enclosures, and 3TB Toshiba/Hitachi drives for the NAS. Very unimpressed with WD RED drives - all marketing on what are really just average drives. This is to justify continued higher costs after the flood farce perpetrated on the public. Yes, the flood happened, however, the raping of the customers has continued (easily researched what they've done, and prices don't lie). Lets hope SSDs come down in price soon.... ****** Original review ****** I'm leaving a generous, but temporary, 2-star review. My two drives failed within 24 hours and I'm awaiting replacement drives so I'll update this review after I've tested them. First, I want to state that Amazon's shipping was flawless and I don't think it was a problem for these drives. I currently own at least 25 WD drives (as well as many by other vendors) and ordered 2x 3TB Red drives for use first in external enclosures, and later to be put in a Synology NAS. They never made it past the enclosure stage, and were dead in a day. All work, no play, for me at least. 1) Drives were placed in USB 3.0 external enclosures, initialized as GPT under Win7 (x64), and a NTFS "Quick format" was performed. I then ran a SMART "Quick Test" using WD's Data Lifeguard (DLG), which passed fine. Note: DLG quick test only checks the first and last million sectors, leaving most of the drive unchecked. The drives were each loaded with approx 1.5TB of data, and then shutdown properly using "Safely remove hardware" before disconnecting. Note: the 1-year-old enclosures support 3TB drives - verified with the mfg again this morning - and were previously housing WD and Hitachi 2TB drives without issue. 2) Attempted to start the drives the next day, but they weren't identified by Explorer, and when finally found in Disk Management (under Admin -> Computer Management) they were once again showed as "Not initialized". They were in effect, dead to me. 3) I attempted to mount the drives on another, almost new, high-end computer running Win8 Pro. The drives were not seen by Explorer, but could be found under Disk Management, however, they showed with 2TB labeled "MBR protected" and 7xxGB "unallocated". No data could be read. 4) Contacted WD support. After discussing all events and options, their recommendation was "send'em back to us or Amazon, they're dead". 5) I accepted that something had gone wrong, but again using DLG, I tried a low level process called "Write Zeros". The first drive simply failed with bad sectors after running for 5 hours. I tried to "continue" the process by clicking the pop-up error window 50-100x times before finally giving up. I couldn't format it, couldn't write zeros, nothing worked. After several more attempts, I finally got it to finish a windows format (ran for the last 12 hours), but I don't trust it. The second drive did allow me to Write Zeros, but I don't trust it either. They're both going back. Write Zeros may temporarily "fix" drives, but may also just mask the underlying problem(s). (And yes, I understand erasing vs. formatting, the data implications, etc.). WD has a problem, and because of that so do we. I recommend everyone format and test these drives before use. I know drives fail; I've had many drive failures in the last couple of years (3 Seagate, 5 Samsung F4s, etc.) but all before they were mounted in a NAS. Read the reviews, understand that it's a lottery, and though I had hoped for more, I didn't win the first time. You may get lucky.... or.... you may not. I'll update this review after receiving my new drives, and have tested them in brand new enclosures.