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

Your typical, run of the mill, mechanical Hard Drive. This thing gives you a good amount of storage at an extremely reasonable price.

This review is for the 6 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. 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

This Western Digital hard drive is a little more expensive but it has superior reliability and performs well. I rarely have problems with Western Digital hard drives. All others seem to crash shortly after the warranty expires. Not Western Digital. They last for at least ten years.

I had no complaints until I found (with CrystalDiskInfo) that there were uncorrectable and pending sectors beginning to build up at an alarming rate after only 4 months of owning this drive. The warranty period is 5 years, so I was shocked it would fail so soon, but WD did agree to an RMA. However, the other reason I would not purchase this (or another WD product in the near term) is their very poor RMA process and support. Not only do they not pay for return shipping or send you a replacement in advance, they will void your warranty if you dont pack it right. Of course I plan to follow the instructions they lay out, but it is not confidence inspiring or a friendly process. Sometimes you can find a 4TB SSD for barely more than this product; I recommend going that route instead.

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.

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 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.

Bought on sale, used 24/7 for about 4 months at time of review Purchased this to replace my primary drive in a Dell computer that was killing every SSD I fed it. I have had reasonable luck with every hard drive I have owned, except when they were used in dell computers. This one seems to have broken the curse. A little noisier than some (head movement and platter spin whine) but most people will not notice if their computer case is closed. Good value for the money, I would purchase again

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.

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:)