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

This is definitely CMR and not SMR (curse those who invented the latter). Id have preferred a 2.5 format, but this was the one on sale. And Im unclear that theres any difference between this and the WD 1TB _Red_ CMR HDD, but that the black is 7200_RPM, and the red 5400; as Im not noticing any excessive heat (I used an _unnecessary_ heatsink thats not worth the trouble to return), and my application doesnt care about the speed boost of 7200/5400, Im entirely satisfied.

i get decent performance from this hard drive but at times it can be noisy but most of the time its quiet good harddrive for the value

Run several stress tests. Good in all

Pretty common thing Ive read for these drives is how loud they are. They are not kidding. The read/write heads click quite frequently, no matter how small a task you are doing. They even sometimes run when the drive isnt being accessed. Recently I switched it to another computer case, and its even louder. Other than that, the drive is great.

This is an awesome drive make no mistake. These Western Digital BLACK Drives wear like iron in my experience. That said video games are getting bigger and bigger with each new title. There was a time not too long ago that a @TB could hold an absolute plethora of games but that day has passed. The mechanical drive is where you store your PC games most economically so you want space to do so. Swapping games in and out from remote sources is a time consuming laborious chore no one loves. Im sorry I brought this drive NOT because it is bad in any way. I am upset having wasted money on this drive because, I stupidly thought 2 TBs would be enough to store all my games. I WAS WRONG! Turns out I needed 4 TBs just to store my current games. I ended up buying a 6 TB drive so Id have room to add games. Same thing if you are a content creator on any social media platform. Creating 4K or 8K media content is a space and processor intensive undertaking. A 2 TB drive as your storage solution wont cut it for long. The Western Digital BLACK drives are dependable work horses in general its just this 2 TB version is an anemic little Philly that might have overstayed its welcome. 2 TBs of storage made for a good drive in its time but it really cant handle the storage needs of systems today. I took a star off for it being essentially obsolete as a valid storage solution but other than that The WD BLACK is a fine storage drive solution in terms of pure functionality!

Wonderful HDD. Holds plenty and is quite fast.

I transferred about 1TB of large files to this drive so far and am seeing sustained write speeds of 230MB/s, and bursts of 750MB/s for the first few seconds. I am sitting right next to it and I dont hear any noise at all. If there is any, its quieter than my very quiet case fans so I dont notice it. I ran the CrystalDiskMark tests and didnt hear any noise during that either, even thought that reads and writes many small files. See my test results image. Overall, I am very happy since it was about 4x cheaper than a similar sized SSD would have cost, and is about 2x faster than any other hard drive I have owned in the past. It really is super quiet also, so I dont know what other reviews are talking about. Maybe this 6TB version is just that much quieter than the 2TB or 4TB versions people are saying are loud? Or maybe WD just improved them (bought mine Feb 2023).

Western Digital Black - What Can You Say :-)

Great looking hard disk, strong materials. Easy to install and so much faster than the one I had before.