Western Digital 4TB WD Black Performance Internal Hard Drive HDD - 7200 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, 256 MB Cache, 3.5 - WD4005FZBX

I have been buying Western Digital drives for decades now and have had excellent drive life and reliability. This 4 TB Black model drive has started out like others I have had in the past. I got this drive to replace a WD Blue 1 TB drive that is now too small for my needs, but is still performing well. Low noise level and excellent access speeds have continued with the 4TB WD Black model. If I have any issues, Ill update this review.

I love WD drives (I must: in the 3 desktop and server machines Im sitting next to as I write this I have 16 of them ranging in size from 3 to 8 TB). And in the room across the hall (my wifes study) her machine has 2 WD Black drives,1TB and 3TB, and neither of them runs hot, but they are both over 5 years old FWIW). Years ago I stopped using a (then) much more popular and slightly cheaper brand and singled in on WD. Why? Because the other brand ran hot and the WDs dont - or at least until I got this one they didnt. The drive sitting next to it is a WD 6TB (red, not black so not 7200 RPM) drive and it has a curremt temp of 30C (86F). And it - as well as the other 4 drives in this drive cabinet have never shown a temp higher than 37C (98.6F). (My Secret: lots of fans and a direct connection to the houses A/C - they have their own duct which keeps fairly busy machines comfortably cool. Before buying this drie I did read reviews but I missed the ones where the people talked about this drive getting really hot. (Ive found and read several of them in the last hour however...) The drive is already installed in the coolest part of the cabinet, and although the (very busy) drives surrounding it are at 36C (96.8F) right now, this one shows up at 57C (134F). Thats too hot to hold in your hand without gloves BTW. Id add another fan to give that a try, but this cabinet already has pre-cooled air (62F at the moment) and 7 coolng fans (3 4 and 5 5) and I dont think it would help. Ive shut that machine down and once the drive cools off so that I dont have to wear gloves to touch It Im going pull it and then returning it. Now maybe the heat problem doesnt sound bad to you, BUT.... Heat leads to drive failures. Not good. What initially caught my attention was that the drive started giving errors - so many so that the system took it off line and warned me. So I guess Ill be going back to a cooler 6TB drive after this, and Ill stick with a WD or HGST with which Im familiar. This the first WD product that Ive ever owned for which I could not give a good recommendation .. and perhaps i just got a lemon. But I cannot recommend this drive to anyone who works in a room with an ambient temperature above 10C (50 F). OK - Im kidding - I dont think the room temperature would help much. I just cannot recommend it to anyone, period.

Because it took five months to buy all the parts I needed for my new computer, and I bought this hard drive first, I did not know that this was a dead hard drive until a few days ago. And of course, Amazon.com only gives customers 30 days to return items, not five months. So now I am stuck going through the WD support site to get a replacement drive. When, and if, I get a working replacement HDD, I will either update this post, or give a new review of this product. MACJR Update: The replacement drive arrived a few days ago, from WD. The HDD itself is very nice, and by itself, would rate 5 stars. The reason I only give this drive 3 stars is because of WD support. The anger and irritation I am feeling at WD right now should have this drive rated at one star, but as I said, the drive is actually very nice. Warning: If you are a Windows 10 user, and you buy a brand new WD drive (although I hear Seagate has, or had, this same issue), the TrueImage software found at the WD support site WILL NOT clone a good copy of Windows 10 to the new drive! The software maker is more than happy to sell you their own full version of the software, with all kinds of extras (that I did not want of need) for a rather steep price for a program an average user would seldom need. That software is priced out of my range right now. I just spent a small fortune, on my budget, building a new PC, there is no extra to throw away on a software package that only has one feature I needed. Warning 2: Be careful about the low cost and freeware options you will find in a search for HDD drive cloning software. Most of it is pure junk, that will not even work, for one reason, or another (and may get you on a SPAM list in some cases, if you give them your e-mail address). On the second day of searching, I finally found software that offered a free version of their software that would allow me to clone a Windows 10 HDD. Search for DriveClone, if you find yourself in the same situation as I was in. It worked. I am still angry at WD, even more so after trying to tell them I found a solution, only to have their support form not work for me today. I just wanted to tell them the I finally got the blasted drive up and running with a cloned copy of Windows 10, from my old drive, and that I did not need the RMA they sent me, that I did not ask for. I am also still angry at Acronis, the makers of the OEM versions of the software that WD and Seagate offer at their support sites. The full version of their software is too expensive for the average person to justify, and most of us would only rarely need it. Acronis does offer a free trial version, but the catch is that the cloning tool is disabled in the trial version. Bleep, bleepity, bleep,,, and so on. Done ranting now. MACJR

Great price and good storage. The drive is a little louder than I like. It isnt loud per say, but it is louder than the other components in my computer. You can hear it spin up and it occasionally...clicks...that isnt quite a good description but it is almost like you can hear the head reposition on the drive.

I just opted for a refund today, as this drive failed in less than a year. It took me so long to return it because I needed the storage and I could sort of bypass errors and repair failures. Today the drive became completely unstable, I couldnt even open file explorer to transfer some of the files I needed to my other storage devices without my entire system crashing. Why do I ask if we are getting rejects, well I included pictures of why I think this. When I bought this product last June I dont think there were pictures of the faceplate and when I got the item with the exposed interface board, I just assumed that was part of the design; after all, there are plenty of exposed components in a PC. Plus I needed the storage and it worked fine for a while, so I still just believed everything was fine. However, a few months later I started having problems. I got errors in BIOS, startup was generally slower and sometimes wouldnt ever stop loading. Eventually, the drive would no longer show up in the middle of using it causing crashes, and most commonly disk write errors on steam. Obviously it completely failed today, losing me about 3.5TB of data. Now, I give this a 3 star rating because of Amazons return policy. Because I was able to process a refund so quickly and with no hassle, technically the issue was resolved, but the item itself is still either defective, or the manufacturers are supplying Amazon with their QA failures. My latter hypothesis stems from other products Ive returned and gotten replacements directly from the manufacturer. Typically, the defects I get from Amazon fail rather quickly, and when they are replaced by the supplier, they are of noticeably higher quality and last longer. In this case, I was apparently missing face plate (the now first product picture that has WD_Black and 3.5 gaming HDD stylized and engraved on it. Thats kind of an obvious discrepancy. I digress. The drive worked great when it worked, very fast and high capacity. I never noticed any noise either, but I also have my fans on full blast (I live in Phoenix, things already get hot for just existing here), so I dont mind noise as long as performance and safety are excelling. Maybe Ill give this item another go since the Barracudas are apparently SMR and not actually 7200RPM but 5400RPM, which is outwardly deceitful, and I think 4k sectors are better.

I recently lost a PC, and am going through a technology upgrade cycle, and wanting to have data redundancy and convenient clones of hard drives to test under various scenarios (different PCs, docks, cloning hardware and software, OSs, etc.) So, I recently bought four of these (One from Amazon, and three from another PC vendor). All four worked as expected right out of the box, taking nearly a 1 TB of Windows 7 OS and user data from other PCs via various drive cloning processes, and then showing up as expected and letting me acess and update the data just fine. The drives seem to run reasonably cool, and are fairly quiet (considering Im running them in external open SATA docks for now), and the speed is fine. Just what Id expect from a modern WD drive. I dont take chances with my data, so am happy to pay the premium for the WD black technology and reputation vs., say the WD blue. I cant report on reliability/durability yet, since Ive had these drives less than a week. If I have problems worth noting, Ill plan to post updates. In my experience (from memory), over the past 20+ years, Ive had a LOT of experience with roughly 30 WD drives. All consumer drives, size ranging from about a GB to 4 TB. Ive had only two problems. One was completely my fault. Back in the day when they sealed the drives with some kind of rubber gasket, I tore a small section of that removing a drive from a desktop case the first time. (Not a HW guy -- didnt know what I was doing). That drive crashed in a few days -- which again was COMPLETELY my fault as air (with hair, dust, etc) got in there for awhile. I had another drive start making noises and refusing to accept a full hard drive clone via Partition Magic version 8.X -- probably in the early 2000s. Again, not wanting to fool around with my data, I quit using that drive. The main reason Ive stuck with WD is the drives seem to be very solid and perform consistently. Ive use lots of both bare OEM and full retail kit WD drives, depending on prices/convenience.

not healthy sounds. its been almost 6 months, never really used it until recently since I have like 10TB worth of storage (as well as this 6TB HDD). Now that I am starting to put things on it, it is making a lot of clicking noises and when I scroll through the pictures I have stored on it and when I scroll they will no load until I hear it wind up and start spinning, then it will load them. While scrolling through the pictures every few lines it loads while going down the list, I can hear it going click, click, click, clickclickclick, click. noises that shouldnt be heard. and for a WD Black HDD the quality should be way above my 4TB WD Blue HDD, which doesnt make any of the sounds this one is (as it should). and since I waited to use it until it was actually needed Im well past my return window and 1 month past the click here for support option. If you happen to buy this test it as soon as you get it by uploading deleting and accessing large # of files on it, to test the waters and see how it reacts and sounds. Im not saying dont buy this, Im say dont do what I did and wait until you actually need it before using it and realizing its not as it should be 100%.

I have had good experiences with WD hard drives through the years. I dont have the money to purchase a large SSD so this drive was my comprimise. So far the experience has been really good. The drive is faster than the one it replaced. The new WD 3.5 6tb drive provides plenty of needed space over the WD 2.5 700gb it replaced. It did take me a while to divide into maximun partition sizes under Windows 10 which as far as I can tell is 3tb. So I divided it into two 3tb partitions one of which is the operating system. Someday I hope this limitation is overcome so that the entire 6tb can be one partition which is recognized as the system drive. Now durability is the only issue that remains unknown. The system runs 24/7 so it is burning in and in a year I will be comforted as to its future durability. This is why I only give it a 4 star rating. In time I hope I can give it a hearty 5 star.

Greetings- I own and operate a one-man computer support company in a small town. Whenever customers hard drives need replacing, WD Caviar and Scorpio (2.5) Black drives are all I use. I dont even give the customer the option, I just order this for them and install, as these have been very dependable and trouble free, and will probably outlast the computer, these days. Quality has been excellent. The only WD drive I have had go bad out of the box was a Caviar Blue (which WD warranted), and that was the last Blue I ordered, staying with the Black. It just works (and, if it doesnt, theres a 5-year warranty). A couple of tips: There are freeware utilities out there (ala Crystal Disk Info) that will read the SMART data from a hard drive and give you a calculated guess as to the health of your drive: Good, Caution, Failing, etc. If I ever get a Caution status, I just replace the drive - I dont fool around with these things. Maybe it runs for a year or two, or is heading south rapidly, you just dont know, so why risk it and wind up in a data recovery situation. Its not a question of if hard drives will fail, but when. They all fail eventually. Ill just grab a WD Black and clone the old to new while I still have a somewhat healthy old drive. Another thing is that crashes and hard shutdowns/restarts can impact a drive negatively, causing it to fail prematurely. So keep that in mind if you have a drive go out sooner than expected. Just send it back and replace it if its under warranty. If you have to order a replacement to get up and running while your old drive is being warranted, theres a bright side to having an extra drive. You can implement a backup scheme where you clone drives and swap them out on a monthly or other schedule, and this way you have a backup drive with all your data that can be taken offsite. This is just one way to put it to use, and there are others. The above accounts are based on my years of real world experience, and your experience may be different. But there you go. Hope this is useful.