WD Blue 4TB Desktop Hard Disk Drive - 5400 RPM SATA 6Gb/s 256MB Cache 3.5 Inch - WD40EZAZ

Pros: Works very well. I threw windows 7 on it, an although it had some formatting issues (more in other thoughts). It seems to perform very well.

Cons: None, other than my mistakes

Overall Review: Windows 7 formatting tool threw this drive for a loop, or probably more likely I did something to give it grief. Had to boot into Linux and reformat it FAT so that windows could recognize and use it. Now it's up and serving as a second drive in my two drive setup. I'm happy

Pros: reliable,,, haven't had a single problem. initial read speed is above 130MB/s which is good for a mechanical HDD. Its silent,, no noise. makes virtually no heat at all. 1TB is enough space for the average user. i can install every game i own on it and still have room for all my music

Cons: HDD price isn't back down to where it should be yet. but this isn't a problem specific to this drive.. this drive is priced really well compared to the other drives available right now.

Overall Review: I often read reviews on here by individuals claiming to have used drives in a office environment and saying a very high percentage of them failed within a short time. i know that many of you readers see the numbers *7 out of 8* and think to yourself. avoid this drive!! well i am telling you that its not the drives at all.. its simply that the builder has tried to save money on all of the computers they built by buying cheap power supplies. the powersupply's job is to provide a nice clean source of power for all the parts. however a cheap powersupply does a bad job of it, and can often produce nasty spikes of power that is stressful to computer parts. the hardrive has no filtration to prevent damage from power fluctuation, unlike every other component in a computer. this makes the hardrive the first part to fail from a cheap psu. I repair electronics, and i have also been building my own computers for the last 12 years. take my word for it. buy a good powersupply, and stick to WD or Seagate and you will be fine.

Pros: The Western Digital (WD) Blue WD10EZEX drive is packaged very well. The drive is in an individual box with the drive suspended by two plastic end pieces. On top of the WD packaging NewEgg placed the box inside another box full of Styrofoam peanuts. It would take some very rough handling to damage this drive. This drive is a SATA 6 Gbs advanced format drive with a single 1TB platter and a 64 MB cache. I used a hard drive benchmarking program called HD Tune to measure this drives performance and I was pleasantly surprised. The transfer rate goes from a minimum of 89.4 MB/Sec to 186 MB/s for an average transfer rate of 148.1 MB/s. The burst rate is a whopping 251.7 MB/s. I also tested the drive using ATTO, another benchmark application, and it also shows remarkably fast transfer speeds. Overall this drive has faster transfer speeds than a lot of drives that I have measured. This may be due to the fact that the drive has a 64 MB cache. The drive is extremely quiet when it is operating. I transferred numerous different sized files with some as large as 4 GBs and I was unable to detect any read/write noise with the drive mounted in my computer. I feel sure that if I were to get close to the drive I could hear some read/write noise, but it is not noticeable at all in normal operation. The drive is quiet enough to be considered for use in a HTPC.

Cons: The access time of the drive is slower than your average hard disk. Using the HD Tune benchmarking program I measured the access time at 20.4 msec. The average access time of other hard drives is in the neighborhood of 15 msec. I would imagine that as this drive fills up or becomes fragmented that the access time may be a concern.

Overall Review: This hard disk was installed in a Windows 7 system that provides native support for advanced formatted drives so it was a simple installation. If you were to install this drive in a machine running Windows XP or earlier then you have to take care of aligning the drive to get your best performance. Some manufacturers have alignment tools available to take care of these issues however, with an OEM drive or a bare drive, these tools will not be provided. Western Digital does however, provide a free tool on their website for this purpose that is available for download. Overall this drive is a very large drive that has a more than respectable performance making it an ideal drive as a secondary drive for data storage. This drive, with its higher full-drive access times, would not be my first choice for a single drive containing a mixture of OS files, game files, and data files.

Pros: 1. Value. This is the price/performance & STORAGE SIZE ‘sweet spot’ for a good all around 'system boot' or main drive to run your Operating System and programs. You simply can not beat it for the money. 2. Speed . The WD10EZEX is among the fastest HD’s on the market in actual read speed and throughput due to their super high areal density – ‘single platter’ design. 3. Dependable. It’s Western Digital. USA corp since 1970. 2 yr warranty. Tried and true designs. 4. Did I mention it’s quiet? I tested it in External USB 3 and ESATA docks and you can not hear anything even from a couple inches away. You can put your ear right against it and all you hear is a very low hum. Using ‘NoTouch™ ramp load technology, the heads actually float over the disks. Building a Home Theater Pc or want a totally silent drive? Here you go.

Cons: Doesn’t come in 5 and 10 TB sizes. (Ok, so maybe thats not a con.) More like: ‘Western Digital, mi amor, I’ll be your best friend if you make me some 5 and 10T versions? Please with sugar?’ Also not a con but a nod to Western Digital's smart way of color coding their drives to make it easy to zero in on what drive is the best match for you based on your needs and budget. The geeks nitpick on stats all day long but it’s minute to the other 99% of us who just want a good drive that's going to meet our needs. The BLUE’s like this one are the mainstream/high performance desktop users best friend. But if you have to have the best: Check out the Western Digital BLACK series. They boast higher performance in certain benchmarks that matter (seek time and warranty) and are important if you are building for business/enterprise applications/ servers with hardware RAID arrays running 24/7/365. For these folks, a few bucks more for the 5 yr warranty is a no brainer. Or for anyone wanting ‘The Best’. Again, not a con - it's Just FYI so now you know and can make an informed decision.

Overall Review: BENCHMARKS! HD Tach pegged it at around 180mb/sec peak with bursts all the way up to 250. Down the road you could add a 2nd one and stripe them in RAID 0 for sequential read speeds as fast as many of the current SSD’s on the market while enjoying the TERABYTES of storage space that you get from spinning magnetic disk hard drives. For those of you that have been patiently waiting on the sidelines for SSD’s to get affordable at sizes from 500GB to 1 Terabyte and up , it’s gonna be a while – until then this will easily tide you over. So there you go. If this review helped you, please click below and say so. Thanks!

Pros: This review is to update a previous review I did on the WD10EZEX 1TB hard drive back on January 19, 2013 as an EggExpert Reviewer. Well this drive barely lasted nine months before failing. I was surfing the web when my PC started reporting write-back errors. I quickly tried to shut it down, but it hung trying to save changes to my two hard drives. I re-powered it and checked the power supply voltages, they were within specs. When I tried to boot my PC it would get as far and the Windows logo animation for Windows XP, then it would go black and freeze up. After unplugging this WD Blue drive, my solid state C: drive was able to boot-up to the desktop. This WD Blue Drive was my D: data drive and held 15 years of accumulated data on it. This included digital pictures of my sons when they were little boy through growing up to be young adults. It also held my middle son's recent wedding photos. Fortunately I had a MS-Home Server (2005) that faithfully backed up both of my hard drives every evening after midnight. So my data was not lost. I had another identical brand new WD 1TB Blue hard drive on my shelf. I quickly installed the new drive, long formatted it and mounted the original data from the most recent backup as drive Z: The rest of the evening was spent using Allway Sync to copy the data from the server Z: drive to the new D: drive.

Cons: I should have taken my own advice in my first review and installed a WD Black or Enterprise drive. My logic at the time was that this old XP system was going to be put out to pasture in 2014, with support for XP ending in April of 2014. I figured a WD Blue drive should last at least a few years given the two-year warranty? Wrong! Is it me or are both major hard drive manufacturers having a higher failure rates since the flooding problems in Asia. I have had to RMA more of my customer’s drives this year than I can ever remember in past years. Would be nice if a large company that uses a lot of hard drives could clue the rest of us in on the current reliability rates they are experiencing. I know Google once did a study, but never released the brand names or drive models involved.

Overall Review: I suspect that the circuit PCB on the bottom of this drive failed. It still spins up and Windows will attempt to mount it, but it never makes ready. I have SMART software installed on this PC and there was absolutely no warning that this drive was going to fail. It was like someone threw a switch. It just went offline and never came back. I tried to restart it to no avail. I even try testing it on my trusty Rosewill USB drive bay. No go! Not recommended, accept for lightly used computers that get backed-up on a frequent basis.

Pros: This AF drive is quite speedy for a mainstream (BLUE) model. I actually came close to matching my 2TB WD BLACK HDD I use as my primary hard drive. These are the numbers I put up with CrystalDiskMark: Sequential Read : 128.172 MB/s Sequential Write : 119.947 MB/s Random Read 512KB : 41.054 MB/s Random Write 512KB : 48.449 MB/s Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 0.651 MB/s [ 158.9 IOPS] Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 0.477 MB/s [ 116.4 IOPS] Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 2.350 MB/s [ 573.6 IOPS] Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 0.434 MB/s [ 106.0 IOPS] Not too shabby at all, at least for a mechanical hard drive. Of course, performance will vary from system to system, however the real-world performance I've witnessed backs up my benchmark scores here. Runs very cool. Actually, this drive runs 5c cooler than the other mechanical drives I have installed into my system (I have three other drives). Nice and quiet as well. Can't even hear it during heavy usage. Offers 931GB of space after being formatted for NTFS. More than enough for most folks. Don't have much else to say here. This drive is solid and works as advertised.

Cons: A bit pricey for a BLUE model in my opinion. That said, mechanical drives are still overpriced in general. If you don't need a high capacity drive as your C drive, you should definitely go with a fast SSD instead. The 256GB models are actually priced reasonably nowadays. Only a two-year warranty, compared to the BLACK model's five-year warranty. This says a lot about the drive's build quality, which is why I docked it two eggs. As I said earlier, this is an AF drive (uses 4K physical sectors instead of the standard 512B sectors). This can cause alignment issues if you create a partition using older software that's not AF aware. This can degrade performance by anywhere from 20% to 50%. Partition alignment refers to the starting LBA or sector partition created by the operating system. If the start of the logical sector partition used by the host file system (or software application) does not match the start location of the physical sector on an AF HDD, misalignment has occurred.

Overall Review: I would recommend this drive for secondary storage only. If you want a mechanical HDD as your main OS drive, then you should be looking at WD's BLACK series. The BLACK models offer superior build quality and are slightly faster overall.

Pros: Quiet Cool Cheap

Cons: loudest part in my system?

Overall Review: I had a few 2-3yr old WD Black 1TB drives that were just too loud and hot for my new build (open side panel & 2' from the seating position) This new build I'm going Cool and Quite. Well... the old WD Black HDDs I had were literately hot to the touch with the new config basically giving them zero airflow and anytime I accessed the drives they emitted a disturbing grinding noise as the the drive heads would seek out for the data I requested. nothing is wrong with them, I just never noticed how loud they really were until I took off the side panel and put the PC on my desk 2' from my head. This WD Blue drive cured 90% of the noise issue and 100% of the thermal issue. And to be quite honest, this drive feels Snappier some how. The benchmarks would say otherwise but the drive does seem to do random data fetching much quicker than these old WD Blacks its now replaced (all drives with 0% fragmentation). This Blue HDD is only barley warm to the touch even tho it has zero air flow. It is however the loudest thing in my rig when idle but this is only because all my fans are set to low RPM and my OS drive is a SSD. However don't get me wrong, Its still very quiet. I can still hear my wife's laptop fan kick on 10' across the room over this drive and if I didn't have my fans speed set so low im sure my GFX card fan would easily drown this HDDs whirl sound out no problem. Solid HDD!

Pros: Good $$$/GB ratio. I've never had bad luck with Western Digital drives. Lighter weight due to the single platter design. Theoretically a faster drive (7200rpm, SATA 6.0), however...

Cons: ...it's noticeably slower than the Black (no kidding) and Green drives that I usually install. I attribute the lag to the single platter. Seek and read times are longer since there's more ground to cover with only one head scanning one platter as opposed to two heads and two platters. Only makes sense, right?

Overall Review: I moved this drive around over the month I've had it. It's been the primary drive in a new build, but that gave me the willies (a 1TB primary? Wrong, wrong wrong). Then, I slipped it into an external drive housing. It was well suited for that role. It's size makes it a great backup drive, especially for multiple PC's. I really didn't need another external drive, so I installed it in my HTPC and use it for movie storage. The lag in transfer time doesn't affect playback in XBMC, WMC or iTunes. I really only noticed how slow the drive could be when transferring the movies from my Black and Green drives to this Blue drive. Bottom line: I was wary of Blue drives in the past, but they do the job just fine and come in on budget.