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

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.

Run several stress tests. Good in all

I had high expectations when it came to this drive. My solid state was getting a little full and I was no where near done downloading files. I purchased this to more or less take over as the main drive for my files and archives and let the solid state take care of the OS. Now, why did I buy this rather than say the VelociRaptor? Well, for one, I wanted 2TB and the Raptor doesnt provide anything more than 1TB. Two, the Black is only 15% slower. To put that in some perspective, the 1TB black is ~$75 while the Raptor is ~$205; 273% cost increase for 15% more performance doesnt make much sense to me. So, lets talk about that speed. I will post CrystalDiskMark benchmark for those who love looking at those numbers, but I like to use my butt dyno as my test. Coming from the SSD, I could definitely see the difference in load times, program start-ups, image rendering, model rotating, and yata yata. With all that said, I have never felt the need to yell at my computer to hurry up; everything still moves at a quick pace that satisfies what I need. The next thing on the list is noise. I have eight fans in my case that is a foot and a half from my head. The only time I can actually hear the drive working is when I first open a program such as SolidWorks or BeamNG Drive. Even while doing the benchmark it was quiet. So, unless your computer has no fans and is close to your face, you shouldnt hear too much grunting from this guy. At any rate, this is a great drive if you need the space and speed and just cant find the want to fork out the big bucks.

safe packing and fast delivery recommended

It works like it should. Booted off of the disk I indicated. Just loud is all.

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

Well, my last WD Black drive only lasted 2 years, but thats the nice thing about the 5-year warranty. I got this one as a mirror. The old drive started chattering loudly at 100% utilization during virus scans and backups about halfway through its short 2-year lifespan. One day it finally failed - first disconnected itself, and then when I reconnected, it appeared as EMPTY. I first tried scandisk, and it fixed errors, but the disk now showed as full. I ran the free WD Diagnostics and it failed the short test, then on the long test, confirmed it had too many bad sectors to recover. I read online to run chkdsk and do the full surface scan. It took 2 days to chug through the drive, but I got almost everything back. I had a backup drive copy, too, but I had a couple of things from that day that werent backed-up...like my TurboTax file, which was almost complete (Murphys law). I got back the most important files, bought this newer version of the same drive (the free replacement is now its mirror), and restored everything else from backup. This drive (and the replacement for my F1002 model) are running perfectly well, and I cant hear them over the fans, which is a nice change. I have one piece of advice when buying drives: get the highest rated drive with the longest warranty possible that you can afford. I got this one on sale. I thought about the 2TB or even 3TB versions, but I already have a 240GB SSD boot drive, and another 1GB drive (a Seagate that was a replacement for one that lasted 2 weeks - this one is a lucky one...I can tell :). Not to mention, 5TB of external drives, and a 3TB NAS, so why risk a bigger drive? Bottom line: good drive - fast, and quiet, and I sleep better with a 5yr warranty and a good backup!

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.

Western Digital Black - What Can You Say :-)

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.