Pros: Newegg paid return shipping

Cons: Both drives ordered were DOA.

Pros: Fast, quiet, solid drives, decent warranty period.

Cons: Drives are dated March 2015. Warranty is good until June, 2018 and is two-years not three-year warranty as advertised.

Other Thoughts: I bought 2 X 4TB HGST NAS drives to replace a 3 year old WD Black 2TB drive that was losing data and an older 2TB Hitachi drive. The WD Black was slowing my workstation down due to many bad blocks.

I have been running these HGSTs for a week and they are performing well. They function fast enough and surface scans show all good blocks.

The fact they are advertised they are NAS drives doesn't seem to matter in my desktop. I like the fact that they run quietly.

While I had the NAS drives inside the desktop to transfer data from the WD black, the computer took a long time to boot up even though the OS is on an SSD. I was concerned this might be a NAS effect. After I removed the WD Black from the system boot up has been swift, so the problem was probably the failing Black drive.

Tip: For desktop use not in a RAID configuration these need to be formatted as GPT drives in Windows. I run these as AHCI. However, if you want to run boot time Hitachi or other test software, you may need to set them as IDE temporarily in the bios for the software to see the drives.

The old 2TB Hitachi is going into a RAID array now that I purchased 3 more identical refurbs from a NewEgg vender at a decent price.

Pros: The cost per GB was the lowest I could find at the time of purchase, with the caveat of requiring a 7200 RPM spindle speed.

The disks initiated, and there wasn't anything odd in the SMART. After a full format, and a complete write via creation of a True Crypt container, there was no appreciable changes to the SMART values (beyond run hours). I can't really expect anything more than that.

Cons: Edit:
Less than 90 days of usage, and a drive failed already. SMART indicated a problem with the reallocated sectors, and it went from 100 to 2000 inside of 5 days.

Hitachi hasn't got a friendly website or tools. The diagnostic tools are useless to a RAID array (though both Speedfan and Intel RST had no issues). The RMA process is difficult, especially when the serial number is 14 digits in length, but you're only supposed to put in 8. The quoted turn around time is a joke, with 14 days being laughable. If they take what they quote, and do the regular cheap shipping you're out a drive for at least 21 days, not to mention you have to pay for shipping.

If I spend a month without my array because of a defective drive I'm going to recommend you avoid the product. Put simply, poor customer support makes a good product bad, because even the best products occasionally fail. If the turn-around is swift I'll be restoring the egg. The ball is in Hitachi's court, and they've got the opportunity to either make me a repeat customer, or find another vendor.

I'm hoping for the former, but a month without my data is too long to be acceptable. I guess this is why you always have a backup. At least I didn't break that cardinal rule.

Original Review:
My only real con is that write speed dips by 30% as you write to the discs. I started my volume creation at about 30 mB/s constant write (measured ~ 2 hours into the write process), and over the three days of formatting dropped to just above 20 mB/s. While that kind of speed is depressing, it isn't unexpected.

Other Thoughts: These drives are pretty amazing for the price. Don't expect lightning speeds as the discs fill, but even without amazing speeds these things are plenty competent at their jobs. Mechanical drive are really the only way to go when it comes to mass storage.

On a side note, I'd recommend allowing a bit of extra breathing room for these drives. They run a bit hotter (1-4 C) than what other drives I've had do, but a bit of extra cooling and some breathing room seems to be more than enough to keep them appropriately cool.

Pros: Good price performance for a 4 TB drive
Newegg's usual super fast shipping
Very well packed in the retail box by HGST

Cons: Maybe not the fastest drive out there, but still OK

Other Thoughts: The drive works great so far. I've only had it a week so I'm just giving initial impressions, and I'll revise this review if anything changes. I have 22 TB spread over 9 drives and this one benches around the middle of the pack. ~ about 130 MB/s, but that's with it now 70 % full.

I'm not using this in a NAS setup, so I'm not taking full advantage of the drives firmware. But anyone looking for a good storage drive or even a multimedia drive then this might be the ticket. The price is good, it has a 3 yr warranty which seems pretty standard for NAS \ Raid \ storage drives. I have this in a JBOD external box. It's just for a backup that gets turned on once a week. But I wouldn't hesitate to pick one up as a Non OS drive, for vid editing or whatever.

If you haven't seen the Backblaze study then Google it. HGST comes out on top for reliability. I think the days of the deathstar are over.

Pros: - Newegg issues a full refund quickly and payed for return shipping

Cons: - Got the drive, installed in PC, started making clicking sounds and motor spinning up/down in a loop, BIOS wouldn't recognize the drive

Other Thoughts: - Bought another model from a local shop where I can return it quicker if this happens again
- Maybe it was a fluke but I'm not buying more than one drive every 5 years so I couldn't say

Pros: very reliable. Ordered 5 of these, all pass HDTune Pro Test.

Cons: Speed not as fast as the 6TB. I got average speed of 130-140MB/s on 4TB and 160MB/s on 6TB, but this is expected since the 6TB has higher density and thus the head can scan more data with minimum amount of movement.

Other Thoughts: Every time I buy new drives, I always run them through HDTune's "Erase" and "Verify" test to make sure both the read and write have no problems before putting them into use. I ordered 5 of these 4TB drives early these month, all pass HDTune Pro Test. I am satisfied.

Pros: Fast, works good and survived a four pass badblocks test.

I have not done any major file transfer testing mainly due to the fact that a gigabit network link is currently the slowest part of the whole system. However creating a dataset that has compression turned off with DD gives me the below results(note since NewEgg filters comments you will need to look up the correct command structure if you want to do this):

dd if=/dev/zero of=testfile b#s=1024000 count=50000
50000+0 records in
50000+0 records out
51200000000 bytes transferred in 95.467597 secs (536307623 bytes/sec)
dd if=testfile of=/dev/zero b#s=1024000 count=50000
50000+0 records in
50000+0 records out
51200000000 bytes transferred in 59.494667 secs (860581335 bytes/sec)

That is a 47.68GB file Written in 95.467597 seconds and read in 59.494667 seconds. In other terms write at 511.462805748MB/s and read at 820.714316368MB/s. CIFS tops out around 130MB/s on a gigabit connection. In the future I hope to upgrade to some 10GB networking cards but at the very least this should keep me going for the next few years.

Cons: No smart conveyance test. The 3TB WD green has one yet this drive does not...

It probably will not get you in with the ladies unless they are geeks too though they are likely already taken. I am sure somewhere out there someone may have proposed to marry my computer though since the drives are so crazy fast it's a lot of hardware but 14TB of USEABLE space at SSD speeds....

Other Thoughts: This is in my Dual Xeon E5640 SuperMicro X8DT6-F, 48GB ECC ram FreeNAS system.

I currently have 2.1TiB used and my latest scrub took about 1.7 hours to complete. This is a raidZ3 array with 3 drive redundancy, What that means is basically if I load ten TB of data on it and up to three drives fail EVERYTHING is still intact.

I am using the in FreeNAS a FreeBSD variant and did a short SMART test followed by a four pass marathon of BadBlocks. After a short and long SMART test the drive was performing just fine. For those unaware of what bad blocks does here is a little info:

Badblocks performs a pattern write to the complete drive followed by a complete read. The patterns are, 01010101 10101010 11111111 00000000

Badblocks and smart testing is about 560 minutes per pass. A smart long test is a single pass while a complete badblocks pass is technically two full passes, one to write to the entire drive and one to read. This puts the drive active for around 84 hours straight. If it can pass that with flying colors then I think it's safe to trust with my data.

If you are getting a drive and not checking it for problems before you put your important data on it then do not complain when there is an issue. You have to think about how complex these things really are.

In 1956 a five MegaByte hard drive was nearly as large as a two refrigerators side by side.

The heads flying over the media float on a cushion of air about 3 nanometers over the disk which in this drives case is spinning at around 5400 RPM. This is the equivalent of a 747 flying at around mach 800 less than 1 centimeter from the ground counting every blade of grass while making less than ten unrecoverable counting errors in an area the size of ireland.

Pros: 4TB

Cons: Slowed down my whole system, just by adding this garbage drive.

Other Thoughts: Might be good for a server, just terrible for anything else.

Pros: Large size

Cons: DOA - new drive with 37 Bad sectors

Other Thoughts: I've always bought WD drives and have several in a home server and I only buy WD for the 30-35 PCs at work. Except for EARS drives I've had very few failures. This is my first Hitachi. After reading all good reviews on these drives I expected more. Hopefully the replacement does better. I think I'll stick with WD from here on. Funny that they are owned by the same company...

Pros: 4TB cap

Cons: in order to use the full 4TB, you need to reformat the drive. otherwise, you're stuck with two 2TB partitions - one of which is completely inaccessible.

Other Thoughts: find a better drive. maybe spend the extra money on a SSD. don't cut corners with this one unless you know what you're doing.