Question 1

What did you use to mount this to your hard drive bay?

Accepted Answer

It is a standard 3.5" device. You mount it like any drive. If I was putting it into a server, I'd put it into an available removable tray. If you wanted to put it into a 5.25" bay you'd buy a 3.5" to 5.25" adapter bracket set, or you could buy a mobile rack too. That would let you remove it quickly from the front. (This assumes your 5.25" bay opens to the front of your system.)

Question 2

Hi. I'm looking at components to build my first NAS. For HD's I've been looking at Seagate 4TB drives, HGST 4TB drives, and WD 4TB Red and Black drives. Honestly, I'm not thrilled with the Reds and I'm still sore with Seagate about the whole firmware debacle a few years ago.

All the PC's I build are running WD Velociraptors as the primary and first-secondary HD's and I really like them but they're too pricey and not large enough for NAS obviously.

What drive(s) would anyone recommend?

Thanks.

Now to try to figure out what cases, firmware or hardware run RAID, etc. aaaah!

Accepted Answer

First, replace those Velociraptors with Samsung 840 PRO drives. lol
I run WD RED drives in my server Storage spaces. Alsthough no speed demons, they are made for NAS environments. Not sure why you are not thrilled, speed or defective units. If it is defective units, thank yours truly, bad packaging. I only order one at a time and no failures yet. Problems mostly related to multiple shipments having drives bang against each other during rough handling. If it is a higher speed and enterprise class, go for the WD SE WD4000F9YZ drives. They are great for NAS, fast and 5 year warranty. Just slightly more than the WD Black you are looking at. I do use the WD Black you are looking at in desktops and the speed is phenominal ~145+ MB/s sustained writes on large files. I am a WD fan boy but I have used many others over the years. WD RMA process is awesome.

Question 3

Can this be compatible with Intel DZ77GA-70k?

Accepted Answer

I have an Asus P6X58D mother board but I do not believe that the motherboard from Intel DZ77ga-70K being a newer board then mine will have ant problem.
It was Windows 7 PRO 64 bit that advised that the size of the drive when initialized would need to be formatted differently; that was suggested at installation and I just went with it and the drive is working fine. I have had it installed on SATA 2 and SATA 3 ports on the board and now is on a PCIX16 series 2 SATA 3 port now and is working fine.
I have ordered and utilize dozens of WD Black drives but this is my first of this size; so far so good hope this helps. Jim M.

Question 4

will this work on a LGA 2011 intel X79 SATA 6gb/s usb 3.0 extended ATX motherboard?

Accepted Answer

The WD4003FZEX works fine on my much older LGA 775 which only supports SATA 2 at 3.0Gb/s.
 The drive itself supports SATA 3 at 6.0Gb/s which is what your mobo has. So the answer is yes, there's no reason why it wouldn't work on your board.

Question 5

Would this be compatible with a Rosewill Throne - Window - Black ATX Full Tower Gaming Computer Case?

Accepted Answer

That's case can take up to 10 3.5" hard drives.  The WD Black is just your average run of the mill 3.5" disk drive, so YES you can put up to 10 of these in that case.

Question 6

I have purchased a WD BLACK SERIES WD4003FZEX 4TB, I've installed it on hp pavilion elite hpe 192it, but the system information I receive yhis message: DescrizioneUnità disco
Produttore(unità disco standard)
ModelloWDC WD4003FZEX-00Z4SA0
Byte/Settore512
Supporto caricatoSì
Tipo supportoDisco rigido fisso
Partizioni0
Bus SCSI0
Unità logica SCSI0
Porta SCSI0
ID destinazione SCSI1
Settori/Traccia63
Dimensione1,64 TB (1.801.755.809.280 Byte)
Cilindri totali219.051
Settori totali3.519.054.315
Tracce totali55.858.005
Tracce/Cilindri255
and I cannot use all the 4 TB of my HD.
I tried with acronis an other partition programs. Allwais the same size: Dimensione1,64 TB (1.801.755.809.280 Byte). Is it my HD defect?

Sincerely

Ugo Donini

Accepted Answer

Couple of thoughts to consider.  A partition of greater than 2TB requires GPT (not MBR) but be careful, I was not able to tell from the HP web site if your Pavilion's system board has EFI BIOS.  EFI is required to boot from a drive partitioned via GPT.  Google these terms if you are unfamiliar with them and good luck.  It is a great drive but does have some system requirements to take full advantage of the additional space.

Question 7

does hard drive diagnostic software come with the product?

Accepted Answer

Western Digital has a program called "Data Lifeguard Diagnostics for Windows" it is available online and works for all drives, not just Western Digital drives. Does not come with drives. Drives ship unformatted and no software is included with them.

Question 8

will this hard drive work as a replacement hard drive for an iMac 24"  early 2009?

Accepted Answer

Short answer: I don't know for sure, but probably it will.
Long answer: physically it will fit. Temp wise it will probably be ok. Electrically those iMacs support SATA 6GB/s drives, so that works.

Big question: do the bios and OS support drives above 2.6TB? Absent a difinitive answer, I would say stick with a 2TB drive.

The guys at ifixit site might be able to help you with the last, but all I saw there were drives up to 2TB.

Question 9

Would you recommend this drive for a type 1 (mirrored) RAID?

Accepted Answer

Sorry, but I can't recommend standard consumer drives for RAID applications. This is not a knock on their reliability - the WD Black series runs rings around the Reds in this respect - but because of the nature of the drives themselves. The Black drives offer powerful, built-in error correction and recovery routines. This is exactly what you want to have if the drive contains the one and only copy of your data. If a failure is detected, the drive makes an exhaustive effort to recover your data. This can last for a fraction of a second to tens of seconds.

During the time the disk is attempting to recover data, it places itself off-line. There are already enough problems without the operating system trying to mess things up further. RAID applications, however, mark an entire disk as failed if it drops out of the array for too long a time.

That's why WD's RE-series drives offer time-limited error recovery (TLER). Seagate has similar routines on their RAID-optimized drives. The rational is that it is better to mark a portion of the disk as failed (not a problem with RAID level 1 and above) than mark the entire disk as failed and force an array rebuild. On RAID 0 arrays, this is disastrous. RAID 1+ will protect you, but your data is at greatly increased risk during the rebuild process.

Where we use these drives are in resilient (i.e. next-gen RAID) systems. These include ReFS arrays under Windows 2012 Server and ZFS or btrfs arrays on Linux. These files systems are naturally resilient, and happily correct for occasions when a drive goes through a prolonged error recovery time. The array itself remains, not needing a complete re-synchronization and rebuild.

Question 10

I was wondering what specific cables I need to hook this up to a mobo.  Does it require a SATA data and power cable?  If so, what does the latter look like?

Accepted Answer

Yes, it does require a SATA data and power cable. They are all the same so if you do a search on Newegg you will find the connectors you will need. You will then need to make sure that first your computer has SATA capabilities (just in case it is that old) and that your computer power supply has that connector for power. If not you will need an adaptor. You may need a SATA cable as well. No cables are supplied with the drive.
The drive is very fast!

Questions & Answers