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RDD / Families and hosts / WD Red

WD20EFAX · WD40EFAX · WD60EFAX · WD40EFZX · WD80EFZX · WD4003FFBX · WD Red Plus · Red Pro

WD Red drive recovery. Three families wearing one colour, and only one of them shingled.

WD Red is three drives under one label. The Red Plus and Red Pro are conventional drives, CMR, with Ultrastar-class mechanics on the larger sizes. The Red with an EFAX suffix, from 2 to 6TB, is drive-managed shingled recording, which WD sold as a NAS drive without saying so until April 2020, when owners found that their rebuilds stalled and their ZFS pools rejected the drives. The class action settled in 2021. A shingled drive keeps a map of where each block really is, and when that map fails the drive reads as blank with the data still on it; when a rebuild's random writes pile up in its staging area it stalls and the controller drops it. Both are bench jobs, and both are recoverable. One failed WD Red imaged for the rebuild is £300 + VAT after the free look, fixed in writing, 3–4 days at the bench.

Free first lookOne fixed figure in writingNo data, no bill on most jobsReturn postage paid

Rather talk it through? An engineer answers the bench line
0800 6890668

Power down. Label every slot before a drive comes out. Do not rebuild while a second drive is flagged. Do not clear or import a foreign configuration. Do not initialise, reformat or PSID-revert anything. A rebuild reads every sector of every surviving member, and on a set whose drives were bought together it is where the second failure is found. Nothing on the drives gets worse while the server is off.

Models we see, family by family.

Which kind of drive is it →
Family Model strings Interface, capacity and notes
WD Red EFAX (SMR)WD20EFAX, WD30EFAX, WD40EFAX, WD60EFAXDrive-managed SMR · 2020 affair · translator faults
WD Red EFRX (CMR, older)WD20EFRX, WD30EFRX, WD40EFRX, WD60EFRXCMR · the drives the EFAX replaced
WD Red PlusWD40EFZX, WD80EFZX, WD120EFBX, WD40EFPXCMR · 5,400-class
WD Red ProWD4003FFBX, WD8003FFBX, WD141KFGXCMR · 7,200rpm · Ultrastar-class

What tends to go wrong on a WD Red.

The SMR affair, 2020In April 2020 it became public that the WD20EFAX to WD60EFAX drives were drive-managed SMR, after owners found rebuilds stalling and ZFS rejecting them. The US class action, Malone v. Western Digital, covered purchases from October 2018 to July 2021 and received final approval on 22 December 2021; the fund and the per-drive payment were reported differently by different sources.
Translator faultsA shingled drive keeps a map from logical blocks to their real place on overlapping tracks. When the map is damaged, the drive reports its capacity and reads as blank. The map is rebuilt on the bench before a sector is asked for.
Stalled rebuildsA rebuild is random writes, and a shingled drive stages them until it can rewrite whole bands. The staging area fills, the drive stalls, the controller times out and drops it. A stalled rebuild should be powered down, not restarted.
Red Plus and Red ProConventional drives with the ordinary faults: heads, defect lists, the second drive during the rebuild. Recovered as any CMR drive is.

WD Red symptoms, and how long each gives you.

Not listed? Describe it on the form →
Clicking or ticking in the slotFailed heads. Every power-on scratches. Power down.Do not delay
Predictive failure on a degraded setThe second failure, announced. Image both weak drives first.Do not delay
Dropped by the controller; reads in a dockOne slow read. Image it before it goes back in.Everyday job
Rebuild stalled at n per centA survivor's read errors. Power down.Do not delay
Two from the set gone within weeksSame batch, same hours. Send both; expect a third.Do not delay
Packing it and posting it: power the server or shelf down, write the slot number on each drive with a marker before it comes out of its carrier, and keep it in the carrier. Send every member from the set where the set is the job, or the one failed member where the set is healthy and you want it imaged for the rebuild. Each drive travels in an anti-static bag inside its own padding, in a box with nothing able to move. Send the controller only if we ask for it. Insure the parcel for what the data is worth rather than the price of the drives, and use a tracked service. The posting address is not printed anywhere on this site; it arrives by email in reply to the form, with a booking sheet to print; the sheet inside the parcel is what matches it to your enquiry when it is opened. Or hand the sealed parcel in at the nearest of ten drop-off points, your name on the outside and the sheet inside; say where you are on the form and it comes by email. We pay the postage home either way. The whole of it is written up on the guide to packing and posting.

What the message means on a WD Red.

Describe yours to us →
What you see The usual reason Where that leaves you
EFAX drive reads as blankTranslator faultMap rebuilt on the bench; data where it was
Rebuild stalled on an EFAX driveStaging area fullPower down; do not restart; image it
Predictive failureThresholds crossed; still readsReplace on a healthy set; image first on a degraded one
Failed by the controller; spinsAnswered one read too slowlyUsually reads on the bench; image it
ClickingFailed headsPower down; matched donor in clean air
Rebuild stalled on this driveUnrecoverable read errorsImaged with weak areas last; set rebuilt from images

From the parcel arriving to your files going back.

Work we have closed →
01

Logged the day it lands, and the first look costs nothing Free

A case number goes on the parcel and a number on every drive the day it is opened, matched to the slot you wrote on it. An engineer settles what has actually happened before anything spins: the interface, the sector format, the firmware, the security state, and what the controller was saying when it stopped. Back to you come two things together: a straight note of what is liftable and what is not, plus one figure, fixed and written down. Accept it, or decline and owe us nothing.

Nothing to pay for lookingA single figure, put in writingNo rebuilds, no imports, no resets
02

The drive on its own bench

A member drive is read on the equipment its interface needs: a SAS imager for SAS and NL-SAS, a SATA imager for enterprise SATA, a terminated SCSI or Fibre Channel controller for the legacy drives, a PCIe adaptor for NVMe. It is never put back in a server, and never in a controller that will try to rebuild. Drives that answer at full speed are imaged; drives with weak or failed heads go to the clean bench, where matched donors are fitted and the service area repaired before a sector is read.

Read at its native interfaceFailing heads to the clean bench
03

Imaged once, at its native sector size

Every drive is imaged sector by sector, head by head where it needs it, with the bad areas last. Drives with 520- or 528-byte sectors are imaged as they are and the extra bytes stripped from the image, never the drive. Self-encrypting drives are unlocked on the imager with the key you supply. From then on the originals are not touched again.

Head by head, weak areas lastNative sector size preserved
04

The image, and the set

Where the set is healthy and one member was the job, the image goes back to you on a fresh drive, sector-identical, ready to rebuild from. Where the set is the job, every member is imaged and the array reassembled in software from the images: order, chunk size, parity rotation and the reshape point read from the drives' own metadata, the file system repaired on the virtual volume, never on the originals. The array work is covered in full on our RAID array site, and it happens on the same bench.

One member: a sector-identical image on fresh mediaA set: reassembled in software from the images
05

You see the file list before you pay

What was recovered is listed for you first, and only then does a bill exist. Approve the list and it is invoiced; turn it down and it is not — and where nothing has come back, most jobs carry no charge at all. Recovered data travels home on fresh media bought in for your job, with the postage at our end. Your case is not closed until you have opened the files on a machine of your own.

No charge until you accept the figureFresh media, supplied with the job3–4 days at the bench

From the bench

  • EFAX is SMR; Red Plus and Red Pro are not. The suffix on the label settles it.
  • Do not restart a stalled rebuild on a shingled drive. It stalled because the drive could not keep up.
  • Blank is a map, not a wipe. The data is on the tracks; the translator has lost its way.
  • Failed by the controller is not failed. Enterprise firmware reports a bad sector in seconds; the controller drops the drive; the drive reads on a bench that waits.
  • Send it in its carrier with the slot written on it, and the controller's log if you can export one.
  • Drives bought together fail together. When one goes, the survivors are on notice, and the rebuild is where it shows.

One job, followed all the way through.

UK · RDD-2026-0569JOB LOGGED ✓

Four WD40EFAX drives in a ReadyNAS 424 RAID 5, rebuild stalled at 60 per cent, then one drive reading as blank

The owner powered down after the second attempt. Two of the four drives had translator faults, one from the stall and one from the years before; both maps were rebuilt on the bench and the drives imaged, and the other two imaged directly. The set was reassembled from the four images and the volume copied out; the replacement drives were CMR.

100% of the volume recovered7 days here, and back by post
Illustrative example — replace with a genuine case

What helps, and what harms.

Do this much first

  • Power down and label the slot
  • Send the drive in its carrier
  • Export the controller log
  • Tell us the model string and the firmware revision

What sets us back

  • Rebuilding with a second drive flagged
  • Putting the drive back in to see
  • Running a long SMART test on a weak drive
  • Handing the failed drive to the warranty courier first

Questions answered before you commit.

Is WD Red Plus SMR?

No. Red Plus and Red Pro are CMR. The EFAX-suffixed Red drives of 2 to 6TB are drive-managed SMR.

My EFAX drive shows as blank. Is the data gone?

Usually not. The translator that maps blocks to their real place has failed; it is rebuilt on the bench and the data is where it was.

Why did my rebuild stall?

Because a shingled drive stages random writes until it can rewrite whole bands, and a rebuild is nothing but random writes. Power down; do not restart.

What does it cost?

£300 + VAT for one drive after the free look, fixed in writing; sets of two to four from £500 + VAT.

Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.

NAS drives as members →Helium and SMR members →WD / HGST Ultrastar →WD Gold and Purple →

Nothing gets worse while it is powered down.

Looking at it is free. Back comes a list of what opened and what did not, together with a single price to finish, set down in writing while you are still free to say no. On most jobs an invoice only follows the data. Until that list reaches you, leave the server off and the drives in their slots.

0800 6890668

Price my jobPacking and posting