Which Western Digital Red NAS hard disk should I buy? (2024 update)

25th February 2024

Back in 2021, I first reviewed the options for Western Digital Red 4TB NAS hard disks. My Synology DS1621xs+ NAS has recently started warning me that storage space is getting low, so let’s review the prices (and also consider the larger capacities) currently available from Western Digital in 2024.

Western Digital WD Red Plus 10TB hard drive

Western Digital differentiates its Red NAS drives into three groups/recommended workloads: Red (lighter SOHO), Red Plus (write-intensive), and Red Pro (highest-intensity).

Model number	Product Number	Capacity (TB)	Internal rate (MB/s)	Cache (MB)	RPM	Recording Technology	Approx. Date	Spec sheet	Price (AUD)	Price (USD)
Red	WD40EFAX	4	180	256	5400	SMR	Aug-20	Link	230	n/a
Red Plus	WD40EFZX	4	175	128	5400	CMR	Jan-21	Link	257	111
Red Plus	WD40EFPX	4	180	256	5400	CMR	Sep-22	Link	202	n/a
Red Plus	WD60EFPX	6	180	256	5400	CMR	Sep-22	Link	289	n/a
Red Plus	WD80EFZZ	8	185	128	5640	CMR	Jan-22	Link	313	n/a
Red Plus	WD80EFPX	8	215	256	5640	CMR	Nov-23	Link	308	179
Red Plus	WD101EFBX	10	215	256	7200	CMR	Jan-20	Link	398	199
Red Plus	WD120EFBX	12	196	256	7200	CMR	Jan-21	Link	515	n/a
Red Plus	WD140EFGX	14	210	512	7200	CMR	Jan-20	Link	658	n/a
Red Pro	WD4003FFBX	4	217	256	7200	CMR	Sep-20	Link	212	n/a
Red Pro	WD6003FFBX	6	238	256	7200	CMR	Feb-18	Link	339	204
Red Pro	WD8003FFBX	8	235	256	7200	CMR	Apr-18	Link	404	229
Red Pro	WD102KFBX	10	256	256	7200	CMR	Jan-20	Link	465	269
Red Pro	WD121KFBX	12	240	256	7200	CMR	May-19	Link	491	285
Red Pro	WD161KFGX	16	259	256	7200	CMR	Sep-20	Link	554	308
Red Pro	WD181KFGX	18	272	512	7200	CMR	Sep-20	Link	583	342
Red Pro	WD221KFGX	22	256	512	7200	CMR	Jul-22	Link	849	419

Notes

Prices listed are from Amazon as of 25th February 2024. Click through the links to get the latest price, they seem to change daily!
The AUD price links to Amazon Australia and the US price links to Amazon.com. (Amazon links are affiliate links)
I live in Australia, hence the Amazon AU links, but sometimes the US prices are more competitive - it pays to compare both.
Dates are from the oldest specification sheets I’ve found for that model or data listed on the Amazon page.
Recording technology: SMR - Shingled Magnetic Recording, CMR - Conventional Magnetic Recording. More info

My choice

I’ve previously bought 4TB drives, but I’m thinking this time I might go for something larger. Because of the RAID configuration I am using, I’ll only be effectively using 4TB of the new drive. But this is planning for the future, as when I buy a subsequent larger drive I’ll then get access to the full capacity of both drives. The ‘Red Plus’ models look fine for my purposes. I don’t need the extra features offered by the ‘Red Pro’ line.

As I write this, the 10G Red Plus WD101EFBX has a discounted price on Amazon US (plus I have some Amazon US gift card credit waiting to be used), so that looks like a good deal. I was originally looking at the 8TB drives, but for only USD20 extra you get another 2TB, so why not?

Table formatting

As a side note, I collated the information in the table above using Excel. Initially, I was going to use a Visual Studio Code extension to paste the Excel content into a Markdown table format, but then formatting the links was not going to be easy. I then realised I could use PowerShell to manage the formatting if I saved the spreadsheet as a .CSV format. PowerShell automation for the win!

eg.

$data = (get-content 'C:\Users\david\OneDrive\Documents\Western Digital Hard disk costs.csv') | ConvertFrom-Csv
$data | ForEach-Object { "| " + $_.'Model number' + " | " + $_.'Product Number' + " | " + $_.'Capacity (TB)' + " | " + $_.'Internal rate (MB/s)' + " | " + $_.'Cache (MB)' + " | " + $_.RPM + " | " + $_.'Recording Technology' + " | " + $_.'Approx. Date' + " | [Link](" + $_.'Spec sheet' + ") | [" + $_.'Price (AUD)' + "](" + $_.'Amazon AU'+ ") | [" + $_.'Price (USD)' + "](" + $_.'Amazon US' + ") |" } | clip