WD Black 4TB Performance Desktop Hard Disk Drive - 7200 RPM SATA 6Gb/s 256MB Cache 3.5 Inch - WD4005FZBX

Pros: Uses 1 TB platters Has a 5 year warranty Very quiet, never made a sound while in use. The only time I ever heard it was when it went into its standby phase and I could hear it spin down as it was shutting off. (Older model was WAY louder, heard it constantly) I tested the previous model of this drive being the WD1003FAEX from 2010 vs. this drive the WD1003FZEX from 2013. Crystal Disk Mark (FZEX) – New WD Drive • Sequential: Read = 198.2 MB/s, Write = 181.6 MB/s • 512k: Read = 85.77 MB/s, Write = 178.2 MB/s • 4k: Read = 1.186 MB/s, Write = 2.517 MB/s • 4k QD32: Read = 3.383 MB/s, Write = 2.553 MB/s Crystal Disk Mark (FAEX) – Old WD Drive • Sequential: Read = 161.1 MB/s, Write = 108.2 MB/s • 512k: Read = 70.22 MB/s, Write = 117.5 MB/s • 4k: Read = 0.770 MB/s, Write = 1.664 MB/s • 4k QD32: Read = 1.793 MB/s, Write = 1.596 MB/s HD Tune (FZEX) – New WD Drive • Minimum: 93.6 MB/s • Maximum: 199.5 MB/s • Average: 154.0 MB/s • Access Time: 16.1 ms • Burst Rate: 338.7 MB/s HD Tune (FAEX) – Old WD Drive • Minimum: 36.3 MB/s • Maximum: 142.3 MB/s • Average: 108.5.0 MB/s • Access Time: 12.1 ms • Burst Rate: 195.0 MB/s Power Consumption (FZEX) – New WD Drive • Idle Drive Off - 0.75 Watts • Idle Drive On – 5.15 Watts • Load Read – 6.75 Watts • Load Write – 7.15 Watts Power Consumption (FAEX) – Old WD Drive • Idle Drive Off - 0.85 Watts • Idle Drive On – 7.55 Watts • Load Read – 8.85 Watts • Load Write – 9.95 Watts Temperatures • (FZEX) – New WD Drive: 75.2 °F • (FAEX) – Old WD Drive: 78.8 °F I also tested the new drive on a SATA II connection and as I figured the results were within a margin of error as some values were higher and some were lower than when on the SATA III connection. So if you don’t have a SATA III capable motherboard, don’t worry about it.

Cons: The only con that I can think of is very minor but while sitting on a motherboard box, the vibration produced by the hard drive was more than I expected and was more than the previous model also tested on the same box. Granted it was not secured into a case like it should but the Vibration Control Technology featured in this family of drives probably would have reduced that as it is only present in the 2 TB and up drives, so my drive being the 1 TB variant, it doesn’t have it. Again not really a con as it wasn’t really that bad just more than the old model.

Overall Review: Overall I am very impressed with Western Digital’s new and improved drives. By switching to 1 TB platters, the performance has greatly increased and their power consumption reduced over their multi platter predecessor. Specifically looking at power consumption this actually used less power than an old 5900 RPM 750 GB WD green drive from 2009 that I have while of course obliterating it in the performance sector. The drive ran very cool as it only has one platter inside and was in a case with fans blowing cool air directly on it. In the end this is no SSD in terms of speed but for file storage look no further. Not related to the drive but Newegg’s new hard drive packaging is fantastic as the drive is held together so tightly I could barely get it out of the box. *All tests were conducted three times to ensure accuracy and repeatability of results.

Pros: For a hard drive, there isn’t much that can be really good or bad. Occasionally, you get a drive that arrives DOA or dies shortly after you install it. Otherwise, as long as it works, it makes most everyone happy. I’m glad to report that this drive not only works, but it’s pretty quick, too. After struggling with several other brands of hard drive makers, I switched to Western Digital a few years back. I have only had one failure, and that was a drive that had been in constant use for more than 6 years. I can’t comment on the reliability of this drive as I’ve only put about 100 hours on it, but if it is anything like the other WD drives I’ve used, it should be good for many years. My current set up uses a 120 GB SSD (550 MB/s read/500 MB/s write) along with this drive and another older 1 TB WD (Caviar) Black drive in a RAID 1 set up. I am seeing up to 120 MB/s read and 100 MB/s write across both drives (see “other” section). I am satisfied with these speeds. Newegg doesn’t officially list any speeds for this drive, but in my experience, this is right around where my existing physical hard disk drives max out. This drive features SATA 6 to take advantage of its capabilities. It also has 64 mb of cache for better access times. Set up is the same as any other new drive; you must initialize it and format it in Windows, or do it during windows installation. Once you do that, you're good to go.

Cons: Again, there isn’t much to say about a hard drive unless it stops working. And this one hasn’t, so I can’t complain about that. The only thing I could really complain about is that this drive does make a little bit of noise, but I can’t say that it is really any worse than my other disk drives. You notice it when the machine starts up, but as long as it isn't next to your head, it shouldn't bother you.

Overall Review: It is worth mentioning that since I run a mirroring RAID set up, my test speeds are limited by the slowest drive which is most likely my older 1 TB drive. However, I don’t think the new one would be much faster spare the fact that it has twice as much cache. A few years ago, I switched exclusively to WD for my desktop hard drives and haven't looked back. I've used them for externals, internals, (3.5"), and even a 2.5" laptop SSD. The only drive I have had fail in 10 years was an old 250 GB drive that had probably seen many thousands of hours of use over 6 years. WD has always supplied me with excellent drives at great prices.

Pros: These drives offer a good combination of capacity, price, performance, and warranty coverage. Benchmark performance is approximately 30% higher than the previous generation of WD Black drives. Real world, subjective performance is better still. Loading 200+MB images into Photoshop is noticeably faster from these drives than the older generation. In all, the WD2003FZEX offer a relatively inexpensive way to add some much needed storage space. On the noise front, I could not hear any difference between the new FZEX drives and older FAEX series ones. Both were quiet. There was, however, less vibration emanating from the new drives. If your case does not have isolated drive mounts, this feature will likely translate into reduced noise. Over the last year, Newegg has improved their shipping for bare drives. All drives are packed into form fitting, air-cushioned bags. For an order of just a single drive, the cushioned bag arrived in a perfectly sized box. A second order, with two drives and other items was packed sensibly as well. The drives were bagged and boxed together inside the larger box. The bad old days when Newegg simply tossed bare drives in a large box with other items appear gone for good.

Cons: I would not recommend these drives for use in a RAID array. WD trumpets their improved error correcting algorithms and "Corruption Prevention Technology" on the FZEX series. All good things for single-drive usage, but likely will cause the drive to drop from a RAID array when triggered. Newegg's packaging prowess unfortunately does not extend to their handling of the drives on the way from Western Digital's bulk packaging to the single-order bags. One of the three drives we ordered had a crunched corner where it appeared the drive and anti-static bag whacked into something. This same thing happened on our previous hard drive order from Newegg - also for a trio of drives. Out of eight 20-packs of bulk WD drives we have ordered from other vendors, every drive was in pristine condition, so I doubt the mishandling occurred at Western Digital's end.

Overall Review: On the warranty front, Western Digital gives very good service. Yes, hard drives die. Whether yours will in the span of the 5-year warranty is a matter of luck. WD offers free pre-shipping of exchange drives in the event of a failure or, more importantly, when diagnostics detect SMART pre-failure indicators. Other drive vendors only ship a replacement after receiving the bad drive. That translates into two to three weeks without a drive. Across all our systems we have several hundred hard drives spinning away (we're a photography outfit for multiple Fortune 100 companies, and generate all too many TB of data). We see a failure rate of about 10% in the first 18 months and, on older systems, an additional 10% after 4 to 5 years. Granted, our systems don't live in large, dedicated data data centers with optimal cooling, but the failure rates we see are close to what backup providers report. In other words, plan for failure. Running WD's full diagnostic tests before using a new drive is good policy. For a 2TB drive, it the extended test runs about 3 hours. If you are paranoid (a good thing in this case!) also run the "fill with zeroes" test to check writing each and every byte. If the drive fails, contact WD directly. When we have found a DOA drive or one that failed initial testing, WD has shipped a new (not refurbished) drive and provided a return postage paid mailer for the old one.

Pros: Performance. This is the best-performing mechanical drive I have ever tested. I have four other mechanical HDDs dating back to 2005, including three other Western Digital drives, and this is the best performer across the board. It even beats my old SSD in terms of sequential writes and random writes (likely due to the on-demand nature of TRIM in the SSD): Western Digital WD1003FZEX: 1000 GB, 7200 RPM, this review 187.01 MB/s sequential read 184.54 MB/s sequential write 60.89 MB/s random read 109.23 MB/s random write Seagate ST3000DM001: 3000 GB, 7200 RPM, purchased 2012 181.42 MB/s sequential read 178.97 MB/s sequential write 50.22 MB/s random read 90.35 MB/s random write Western Digital WD20EARS: 2000 GB, 5400 RPM, purchased 2011 112.32 MB/s sequential read 107.88 MB/s sequential write 31.34 MB/s random read 56.34 MB/s random write Western Digital WD3200AAKS: 320 GB, 7200 RPM, purchased 2007 76.86 MB/s sequential read 75.57 MB/s sequential write 33.68 MB/s random read 43.90 MB/s random write Western Digital WD2500KS: 250 GB, 7200 RPM, purchased 2005 63.55 MB/s sequential read 62.52 MB/s sequential write 31.32 MB/s random read 38.16 MB/s random write Intel SSDSA2M080G2GC: 80 GB, purchased 2009 253.07 MB/s sequential read 81.98 MB/s sequential write 196.70 MB/s random read 39.61 MB/s random write Noise. This drive is very quiet. I don’t have any empirical data for noise, but the hard drive activity never became audible above the hum of the CPU fan in my desktop. Heat. This drive is very cool for such a high-performing 7200 RPM drive. Even after a 100 GB transfer that took around 20 minutes, reported temperatures never exceeded 30°C (86°F). Weight. Not that it matters much with internal drives, but this is a very light drive compared to my other 3.5 inch HDDs. The area below the platters on the bottom of the drive is recessed about 3/16 of an inch further than other drives, I assume because it uses one fewer platter. As a result, it feels much lighter.

Cons: Price. A 5400 RPM Western Digital Green drive with twice the capacity is available for about the same amount of money. However, using the less-expensive green drives would incur a notable performance decrease. In my testing above, this drive had 66% better transfer rates than a 2-year-old 2TB WD Green for sequential reads and writes and 93% better transfer rates for random reads and writes. So for enterprise tasks, one could argue that the performance of this drive merits the increased cost.

Overall Review: For most consumer uses, the 5400 RPM Western Digital Green drives are a better value because they offer at least double the capacity for the same price. The performance loss is not significant considering that they outperform 7200 RPM drives from just a few years earlier. However, for technical or enterprise purposes, the additional throughput can be a real benefit. As someone with I/O-intensive workloads (geographic information systems), this drive offers adequate capacity with exceptional performance. All performance tests were conducted using CrystalDiskMark 3.0.3 x64 with each drive loaded into the same SATA hot swap bay. Testing was conducted in Windows 7 Ultimate x64 with a socket LGA1156 Intel Lynnfield 860 CPU at 2.8 GHz, 8 GB of RAM, and the Intel P55 3 GB/s SATA controller on the Gigabyte GA-P55-UD4P motherboard.

Pros: - FAST drive. Don't get me wrong... it's not going to be equivalent to an SSD in terms of data transfer speeds, but it beats the heck out of crummy 5200 rpm stock drives that some manufacturers still put in PCs. - 5 year warranty. I've yet to exercise the warranty on either of the two WD Black 1TB's that I own... but until their warranties are up, it's nice to know that they are covered.

Cons: None so far!

Overall Review: The 1st WD Black 1TB I purchased about 2 years ago as a storage drive for my main PC build. It's used as a mass-storage drive... you know... pictures, music, videos, PC backup images, Steam library. No issues at all. My experience with my 1st WD Black 1TB lead me to purchase another not too long ago to replace a failing garbage stock drive in an early 2008 iMac. Following the instructions from a popular repair site... everything went perfectly and now that iMac is back up and running better than ever! When 1TB SSD's are this price... I will skip getting the WD Black, but until then... this is my go to drive for the storage / money.

Pros: This is an excellent drive. Here is what I like about it 1. 5 year warranty (that's a lot) 2. SATA III (6.0 Gb/s) 3. 7200 RPM 64MB cache (snappy response and access times) 4. Read / Write speeds are impressive I ran some benchmarks on this drive and I am very impressed. This drive actually comes close to the speeds I got with my very first SSD (back in the day, OCZ Agility 60GB). The full test details are in other thought's but here is the jist: I averaged around 150MB/s read speeds and 160MB/s write speeds on this drive during benchmarks. I then decided to do some real-world tests on this (ish) and decided to copy my entire C:/ drive onto this drive (OCZ Petrol SSD) I averaged 140-160 MB/s for the 60+ GB worth of stuff I was transferring. Once that finished I copied from this drive to a folder back on the C drive and averaged 160-170 MB/s. Needless to say I am very impressed with this drive. I have several other WD drives, all of them "Green" drives that I used for media storage. I can average about 40Mb/s with these drives on a good day. For now I am going to use this drive to run programs, should see a bit of a performance increase off the hard drive that I am running them on now. By performance increase I mean I won't have to wait as long for my games to load :D

Cons: Here is what I do not like: 1. Noisy when doing some serious read/writes (benchmarks really) 2. ..... Ok so far this is the only con that I have about this drive. it's not really much either, this drive is far louder than my green drives, but that is to be expected because they are 5200RPM while this is 7200RPM, they are power saving while this is performance. It only bothers me when I run benchmarks, If I'm gaming then odds are I have my headphones on which means I can't hear the drive or the 9 fans running in my PC! I can't really foresee any problems with this drive. I've been running WD products for years with almost no issues

Overall Review: Here are specs of my machine in which the following tests were run: Motherboard: ASUS Sabertooth 990fx r2.0 gen 3.0 CPU: AMD FX-8320 OC 4.51Ghz RAM: GSkill DDR3 1600 x 16GB GPU: 2x ASUS Radeon HD 7850 Crossfire For the following tests I used HD Tune Pro 4.01 HDD utility: Read test 1: min: 94.2 MB/s Max: 173.8 MB/s Avg: 141.3 MB/s Access Time: 12.2 ms Burst Rate: 313.7MB/s Read test 2: min: 162.9 MB/s Max: 176.1 MB/s Avg: 168.3 MB/s Access Time: 6.8 ms Burst Rate: 311.3MB/s Read test 3: min: 158.2 MB/s Max: 180.5 MB/s Avg: 161.2 MB/s Access Time: 11.2 ms Burst Rate: 316.8MB/s Write Tests: Write test 1: min: 84.8 MB/s Max: 170.7 MB/s Avg: 138.8 MB/s Access Time: 12.3 ms Burst Rate: 315.7MB/s Write test 3: min: 147.2 MB/s Max: 173.0 MB/s Avg: 160.8 MB/s Access Time: 6.9 ms Burst Rate: 313.4 MB/s Read test 1: min: 149.0 MB/s Max: 173.2 MB/s Avg: 161.1 MB/s Access Time: 6.8 ms Burst Rate: 312.9MB/s I have been using WD products for a while and I trust them and I trust their warranty. I have had to return two drives which failed prematurely, no loss of data because I make plenty of backups and I was warned via S.M.A.R.T checking. Their return process is easy and I was mailed new drives as soon as they received the old ones. Everything about this drive is awesome, fast speeds, decent price, and an awesome warranty. I would without a doubt recommend this to a friend.

Pros: - Reliability - Capacity - Performance The WD Black series of drives is a personal favorite, and where I turn for many of my performance HDD needs. I have been using these drives since they were originally released and have never had issues with any of them. They are great for gaming or any other HDD usage intensive applications. They offer a high level of performance that gamers expect and desire.

Cons: None.

Overall Review: I would normally have done a list of benchmarks, but there is no need, the performance of these drives is pretty well known. This specific drive was purchased for a customers new gaming PC build. As with most cases, setup of the drive was fast and simple. It is being used as a storage and games drive, paired with an SSD boot/OS drive. If you're looking for a great HDD to use for gaming, your Steam library, or just for general high performance, then this WD Black should be high on your list of considerations.

Pros: This hard drive is by far the fastest platter hard drive I have ever used. I have strayed away from platter hard drives for over 5 years now (2009) and it is hard to use a platter as a main boot and system drive but this thing is great and reminds me of when I went from 5400 to 7200 hard drives. Maybe not as noticeable but you will enjoy the speed of this 7200 RPM drive.

Cons: Size and noise are the only issues I could find with this drive after many weeks of testing. I already have a very loud desktop system with 8 large fans so it's no big deal to me. You can hear the heads moving across the platter which still isn't the noisiest hard drive and the extra noise is not adding much to my already loud system. Size wise, its of course larger than a SSD which I have become accustomed too and it feels like brick in weight. Could be doubled as a weapon. No, but not something you would want to put in a portable desktop system because it is 1.66 lbs. You get 2 T of storage so the weight is not really that big of a con.

Overall Review: The drive is loud but the reward is the fastest platter drive I have seen. For me its easy to outweigh the speed over the noise as I am a power user and love performance. When the drive is working at full speeds this is when the noise becomes the most noticeable. The speed of this drive really is worth upgrading from previous 7200 RPM drives. It's snappy and I would recommend it to anyone that wants a great drive with a lot of storage.