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

Installed easily in my HP Envy desktop.

Perfect

I build gaming PCs as a hobby and part time business. This is a massive drive at a great price from a good company. I have my entire Steam library of almost 200 games as well as iTunes library and its not even a quarter full. Quieter than my fans, plug and play. If you can use 8 gigs then its a no brainer.

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.

First one was defective and returned, second one works with no issues so far.

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.

First of these drives, very recently, was a 6TB. It was incredibly fast (~200ish MB avg) versus my other drives and quite quiet. It did click when writing data, but not very loud. I just got another 8TB and it spun the platters up to take off speed, and slowed down the computer post speed (must have had problems recognizing drive), so obviously something very wrong. Amazon is replacing (will update when received, but Amazon takes 2 weeks to ship replacement somehow now) But...for those saying this is loud, if it sounds like a crazy spinning wheel of death, its broken!...it shouldnt be louder than most case fans... I cant hear my 6TB over the fans (which are very quiet) when the case is closed. Just wanted to point out that some of these loud issues may be bad drives...I had never seen a drive try to take off with its platter spinning like the bad 8TB drive.

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

This review is for the 8 TB black hard drive. I have owned several different brands of hard drives and several different versions of WD’s hard drives over the years, including the greens, reds and purples. I have only have had one failure in that time, which happened to be worked hard, operating on a security camera server for a few years before failing. This is my first black as I wanted a reliable drive for backing up my desktop. These hard drives have a great 5-year warranty, which is one of the big reasons, I purchased this. I connected this drive to my Windows 10 computer with no issues. It took less than a minute to get setup and going. It was pre-formatted, so it was quick to a drive letter and get going. File transfer speeds are fairly speedy for a large size drive. I do think the drives are a bit pricey, but have come down in price over the last couple years. I currently have three of the black drives, this 8TB, a 6 and a 2TB....all have been reliable so far. Overall, other than being slightly pricey, these are great hard drives with good speeds and good warranty that I expect to be reliable over the long term. 4.5 stars