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.

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

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

This review is on the 8TB WD Gaming HDD. It is an OEM HDD, so no cables, no Acronis software, and no manuals when you purchase. The Amazon description should be adjusted to match this. You need mounting hardware if you dont already have it. You will also need a SATA data and SATA power cable. Other than that, great drive.

Ive been using WD hds since the early 90s and theyve been consistently reliable for me, more so than their peers, which I why I tend to gravitate towards them when buying hds. To be honest its been years since Ive bought one since my pc is all SSD or at least it was until I installed this drive. Previously my fastest hd was a wd velociraptor but this one is very fast for a mechanical drive. Id hoped that the Seagate hamr drives would be available to the public by now but alas enterprise customers only. I needed large capacity storage and a 4tb ssd is $600 so this was a happy medium that I could live with. I have included my crystaldiskinfo drive test so you can see my throughput. My system is an AMD X570 with a R9 3900X that was using a crucial mx500 2tb sata ssd for storage but its just not enough room for my 4k videos. I dont hear much drive noise when its active but then again my Cooler Master HAF932 case is loaded with fans and I tend to hear my gpu and aio fans above everything else so they could be drowning it out. Bottom line is that if you need a new hd this one would not disappoint you for a mechanical drive. I keep my games on my ssds so I cannot comment on things like loading times from them but you see the drive test so you know what Im getting out of it.

Received them, tested them all night, put them to work the next day, still running; much quieter than I thought theyd be. Pleasantly surprised, thanks!

Some people might find it stupid to buy a drive like this just for storage but after trying a couple of other brands and dealing with crap like SMR and loud and flat out defective drives from other brands its worth it in my opinion. This drive is pretty loud when seeking but is silent otherwise and I can deal with that. Im happy I was able to finally get a decent drive.

In Nov. 2009, I bought a 650GB WD Black series HDD to replace a crashed disk. I specifically bought the Black series because of the marketing claims of better construction and reliability. Unfortunately, that didnt turn out to be true for me, since I had to buy this 1TB disk as a replacement just over 4 years later. Maybe I have high expectations, but a 4 year lifetime seems pretty poor. Luckily, I had installed an SSD as the boot drive a few months earlier, so the computer would boot and I could get email and use the internet to order a new HDD. I first noted the failure while I was running a backup - an obscure file couldnt be read. I deleted that file and tried again and more files were listed as corrupt. I ran chkdsk and it reported no problems as did the SMART ap. By the next morning, the disk was unusable. I reseated the SATA cables, swapped in new ones and change to a different power plug with no effect. I think the problem must have been in the electronics and not in the disk itself. Amazon got the new drive here in 2 days and it was decently packed. Installation was easy and restoration from a week old backup went smoothly. Of course recreating the week of lost work required a lot of time. The new 1TB drive seem fine, but it is still slow compared to an SSD. If you really want to improve your computing experience, buy one of those. But remember SSDs wear out (really) so make sure you back up your data so you dont lose everything. Of course HDDs fail too, so back those up frequently. I gave the drive 4 stars because I was not happy with the reliability of a previous product. Maybe in 10 years I will update this review and report excellent performance.

This will probably be my last old school hard drive till I build or buy another computer in a few years. Drive seems to perform pretty good but I probably would have been better off going with a little slower but more quiet drive. For the most part it isnt too loud but sometimes for no apparent reason it goes crazy. It went crazy when I decided to use a screen saver. Windows is on a small solid state drive so not sure why this hard drive was firing off when that was active. So I quickly went back to just blanking the screen out after so long. If its on sale and you rock headphones or play music/games pretty loud then you will probably be satisfied otherwise seek quieter options.

5/23/14 This WD Black 1TB is used as my primary data drive. I use a Kingston SSD as my O.S. / application drive. Win7 volume creation and format went without a hitch. The xfer of ~500GB data from my WD Red drive to this new WD Black drive went smoothly. This new Black drive has much faster read speed and very respectable write speed compared to other 7200rpm SATA drives I have used thus far. I also noticed that when I booted to win7 from it (I loaded a backup boot partition in case my SSD failed) the speed was impressive. No, not nearly as fast as my SSD but much faster than my backup WDSE and WDRed NAS drives which are also 7200RPM SATA3. Ive had Seagate 7200 RPM SATA3 drives which are not quite as nimble. Alas, it was all too good to be true:( My super speedy Black drive started clicking & chunking after appx. 2.5 mos. Hey ... This happens sometimes with hard drives ... ok, no big deal, the drive came with a 3yr. Wd warranty. This is where the fun started: Went to WD website and spent appx. 1/2hr. in RMA process. Very easy. Sent my RMA drive back via UPS label I printed from WD website (very convenient). After appx. 7 days I checked the RMA status on the WD website. WHAT??? The model# I sent them does not match the model# they are sending me. I looked up the model# they were sending me and it was the slower / cheaper Blue hdd with only 1yr warranty. I called WD to confirm. They answered the call after a few min of going thru the phone tree. The person I spoke to was very polite and spoke with no language accent issues. He said they didnt have any Black drives to send so they sent the Blue. I tactfully let him know this was not acceptable and requested a WD Red or SE drive as a replacement. You would think I was asking the United States Congress to agree on something. I have talked to 3 different reps on 3 separate phone calls with no resolution. I have had numerous business dealings with WD in the past. I was in network I.T. for over 20yrs. I have never gone through this much trouble with WD. Politely offering no resolution after hours of my time does not cut it with me. All this over a $90 hdd. Ill update when the issue is finally resolved. UPDATE 5/28/14 I called the corporate WD cust. svc. line this morning. The operator was very helpful and made sure I was connected to a live person, not voice mail. The Customer Service rep was very polite and sympathetic, but most important he resolved the issue within 30 min. The only reason it took even that long was because we were searching for an appropriate replacement drive I would be happy with since they had no (Black) drives to send me. I couldnt believe he actually offered a very generous upgrade for my time and inconvenience, which I of course accepted. I have always thought very highly of WD products. My faith in WD service is restored. I cannot upgrade the stars on my review because I am not receiving a (Black) hdd. I will give WD as a company a very favorable rating and will not hesitate to purchase from WD in the future. Update 5/29/14 My replacement drive arrived today, ahead of schedule. The drive is installed as my primary data drive and is loading as I write this. The drive is everything WD promised. I am a happy camper:) Update 11/25/14 Since my initial review I have added the following Western Digital hard drives to my systems: (2) 4TB SE NAS enterprise class 7200rpm (1) 4TB Green 5400rpm (2) 1TB Velociraptors 10,000 rpm All my W.D. drives are performing well 24x7. I run full Lifeguard diags on them once per week and have had no issues. The point is: Western Digital hard drives, as a whole, perform very well under very demanding conditions. I am chalking up the initial issue I had with the Western Digital service department as a one time fluke. They really did go out of their way to make it right. UPDATE 6/16/16 Since there are quite a few hits / comments on this review I thought I would supply a quick update All my WD drives from 2014 are still running great:) 24 x 7. UPDATE 4/6/18 Since there are quite a few hits / comments on this review I thought I would supply a quick update Green drive failed last month. WD sent replacement with no hassles and quick ship processing All other WD drives from 2014 are still running great:) 24 x 7. Thank you all for your comments. I am happy to have been helpful:)