Western Digital WD Red 1 TB Actual User Experience?

Back at the end of August, I purchased a new Pro 6 from Newegg and part of the combo package was a WD10EFRX. (The combination of the two was $10 cheaper than the Pro 6 alone, so I went ahead and got the drive). The array did consist of two Hitachi Green 3TB drives about a year old and two Seagate 1TB drives about two years old. One of the Seagates was a refurbished drive and the other had a low count of errors on it. So, I replaced the Seagate with the low error count with the WD. It now has 1128 hours and LCC count of 7, a power off retract count of 6 and power cycle count of 14. When Newegg had a deal on the WD10EFRX, I bought another and it replaced the refurbished Seagate. This drive has been in service about 27 days (641 hours) and has an LCC count of 1, a power off retract count of 1 and a power cycle count of 3.

I had avoided WD drives for use in the Raid environment like the plague until the Reds came out. But then the Hitachis became unavailable and Seagate seemed to be going through a period with firmware issues. WD seems to have hit a home run with the Reds, and they are certainly in demand and general short supply with a slighly higher price as a result.

For comparison, the first Hitachi in the Pro 6 now has 11,620 hours (484 days) on it and has an LCC of 34, power off retract count of 34 and a power cycle count of 30. The second Hitachi had 11, 612 hours on it and an LCC of 31, a power off retract count of 31 and a power cycle count of 28. I am very pleased with the Reds and will definitely be adding more of them to my HD count.