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WD Red NAS drives come with built in firmware (NASware 3.0). If the drive is not going to be used in a conventional NAS device, such as a Synology or FreeNAS machine, are there any special procedures required to install it on a bare metal Freebsd 11.2 machine with ZFS? Will the firmware conflict with the operating system or filesystem in any way?

This particular machine will have only two mirrors. It will not have any raidz devices at the moment.

  • WD’s documentation mentions nothing about this, and is quite vague about its firmware. Please let me know if this question is inappropriate for this site, or how I can improve it, as it was already downvoted. –  Nov 11 '18 at 02:06

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"NASware" is just WD marketing speak for drive firmware they claim to have optimized for use in NAS devices. There is no specific action you need to take beyond just using the drive normally. However, you may wish to create your zpool with ashift=12 to ensure that it is aligned on 4K sector boundaries.

Michael Hampton
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