Questions about WD Red Plus

I assume you mean screws of the following type? Supermicro MCP-410-00005-0N: HDD Screws or Supermicro MCP-410-00006-0N: HDD Screws

As far as I know, the PS4 only has one bay for 2.5" hard drives. So if you can bend space and time, you can use a 3.5" hard drive in a 2.5" bay. If you can't, there's a filter under PC Components>Storage>Hard Drives where you can view only 2.5" hard drives. Actually, all these hard drives should work with the PS4 :)

Yes.

Speaking for the 2013 efrx (old wd-red, now re-labelled as wd-red-pro, CMR), mine have yet to annoy me. The WD40EFRX was known as _the_ known good among the new garbage marketed as WD-RED in the SMR scandal. Whereby good is relative: reasonable failure rate even with RAID use, with acceptable performance and slightly cheaper in price than better disks. I think the refresh is also OK. But in view of WD's information policy (SMR disks, especially the disaster of SMR disks in the WD-REDs and their almost complete uselessness for NAS/storage (except read-only archive use without RAID), incl. associated class-action law suite; i.e.: red pro are the possibly acceptable reds, new "only-reds" are SMR and to be avoided) I would rather let them hang out for another year and then read reviews. Which explains the price. For ANY other size or series, however, I would (1) still look at Seagate's Iron Wolf, and (2) look at the chosen platters in the Backblaze harddrive stats. WD was kicked out of there for a reason (not only SMR) and has to work _*HARD*_ to regain trust... And regarding the size of the disks: also look at the repair times, e.g. for arrays. A raid with 16TB disks is actually no longer repairable in a reasonable time with SATA. About the warranty: WD itself claims on shop.westerndigital.com 3 years for all Red Pros, and therefore also for the EFZX (the other one is not mentioned there anymore).

That's why I'm buying it. A 4TB HDD internally in my tower for images (CR2-DNG-TIFF-JPG-etc...). And two other 4TB external (two identical copies, you can never be too careful). And another 3-pack for "office" data.

The Red Plus series was introduced by WD purely because of the CMR/SMR confusion. All Red Plus are CMR. https://www.heise.de/news/NAS-Festplatten-Western-Digital-fuehrt-WD-Red-Plus-fuer-CMR-Garantie-ein-4794455.html If you want to avoid the WD mess altogether, use Seagtae IronWolf disks.

I did a quick google for you: No, this model is not explicitly mentioned on the Synology HDD compatibility list: https://www.synology.com/de-de/compatibility?search_by=products&model=DS720%2B&category=hdds_no_ssd_trim&p=1

This type (CMR) hard disk is intended for installation in a NAS, as these are usually intended for 24/7 operation and not for use in a PC.

Yes the WD20EFRX is CMR and the WD20EFAX is SMR. Source: https://www.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/wd-red-hdd

I am not aware of any special precautions that need to be observed.

This is a "naked" hard disk which is intended for internal use within a PC, server or NAS. An external hard disk is suitable for your purposes. The following three aspects must be taken into account. 1. connector, mostly USB type A, is standard and is available on almost every PC, except the newer "Mac Book Pro" models and a handful of others which only have type C. The Mac Mini is equipped with a USB connector. On the Mac Mini, USB Type A is present on both the newer and older models, and USB Type C on the newer model. 2. storage capacity. For Time Machine backup, your Mac Mini's storage capacity should be multiplied by two. If your Mac Mini has 500GB, you should get at least a 1TB drive. 3. read/write speed. This is entirely up to you. If you need an overnight backup, a standard "mechanical" hard drive is fine. If you need a super fast backup, you should go for an SSD which is more expensive. For backup purposes, however, mechanical hard disks are superior to SSDs because they "age" relatively quickly for regular and large data streams and break down. https://www.digitec.ch/de/s1/producttype/externe-festplatte-114?q=externe+HardDisk&tagIds=76-535

I have four of these disks in operation. Top-notch hard disks. Whether a double-sized disk makes sense depends on the raid system. I have formatted the NAS with "Synology Hybrid Raid". With this, a hard disk can fail and no data is lost. But this also means: If I were to insert a fifth 8 TB hard disk in addition to the four times 4 TB hard disks, only 4 TB of this 8 TB hard disk would be used, the rest is "lost". Here you can look up which hard disks make sense for which Raid configuration: https://www.synology.com/de-de/support/RAID_calculator

Yes. The NAS supports up to 20 TB.

Hard disk works with the DS212j. Hotswap and the like depends very much on how the NAS is currently set up. If the hard drives are currently mirrored, it should work to replace one hard drive, wait until mirroring is restored and then play the game with the second hard drive. Restoring mirroring is super slow though. Backing up data and configuration and then restoring them would be faster. Good luck!

Of course. Basically, this is a normal SATA hard drive, but it has been optimised for use in a NAS. I have an 8TB WD Red in my PC myself ;-)

Hello, as long as the capacity is the same, it will work ;)

So no one is forcing you. However, it can make sense to use the appropriate "colour" of the hard disk for your effective application. Here is an overview: https://idomix.de/wd-black-blue-red-purble-was-die-farben-bei-western-digital-bedeuten

Make a backup and then a restore!

Yes, you can also install the hard disk in a PC. https://www.wdc.com/de-de/products/internal-storage/wd-red.html

Ideally, you should take 2 identical disks. So not only the same size, but also the same type/model, because of caches, operating modes etc. Mixing 3 and 4 TB is rather stupid, e.g. with a RAID 1 you then only have 3 TB.

I bought it for a Synology DS 1511+ and it works there without any problems. However, I once had a disk that was already formatted. It was not recognised either. I simply deleted all the partitions and the disk worked again. Maybe that helps.