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: High sequential speeds. Max transfer rate was 175 MB/s, with the lowest being 92MB/s. That resulted in a 147MB/s average transfer rate. This drive is definitely no slouch. Low noise level, seem to even be quieter than Greens I own No idle noise or chirping Robust, reliable firmware

Cons: Access times. Drive seems to be tuned toward low noise levels at the expense of seek times. WD's previous line of 1TB "Blue" drives was quite the opposite. Perhaps they received flak for this and made changes to this lineup to address noise. Benchmarks put access time in the neighborhood of 20ms. This is slower than most other 7,200rpm drives competing against this. The difference we're talking about is minimal and probably couldn't be quantified in real world use, but that has the potential to make this a poor candidate for a main hard drive on which to install your Operating System and applications.

Overall Review: This drive is a single platter design, thus sports the most advanced areal density you'll find in the mainstream / performance segment at this time. Higher areal density generally yields greater transfer speeds and the benchmark results confirms this drive is no exception to the rule. Single platter designs weigh less, use less power, and are usually more reliable due to the reduction in the number of moving platters. Fewer heads, less platter surface area means less to go wrong. The downside is that larger drives (with more platters) of the same RPM and platter density have an innate speed advantage, because they physically seek less distance. In a 3 TB, three platter design for example, 600GB would be spread across 20% of the surface area, while 600gb of a single platter drive would cover 60%. Much of the "slowness" of a conventional hard drive is attributed to the time it takes for the head to move across the platter and find the data. If the head only has to move 20% of the way across the platter versus 60%, you can guess which one would win a speed contest. Drive is packed extremely well. It will not come with a cable or any accessories which I'm sure will garner needless egg reductions from those who are too ignorant to read the description thoroughly. Quiet, solid performance is what you'll get from this drive, and that's a good thing. Black edition drives are available for those who want every last percentage of speed, or who want to win benchmarks. Being the only true mechanical device in a modern computer, the potential for a hard drive to fail can't be avoided. WD drives in my experience, have above average reliability. I've had some failures over my many years of building computers, but certainly not at a rate that would be alarming.

Pros: Reasonably quiet hard drive detected quickly in all machines I connected it to. I used it with various HDD docking stations to move large files between a few machines. Worked every time and very well. Transfer times were quick in certain circumstances(large video files for example) and drive has been standing up to multiple re-formats. Pretty quick for a standard hard-drive, probably due to the 64MB of cache, which is usually reserved for the Black Edition hard drives. As I stated prior, I've used this on a bunch of machines and it was quick in each one. Whether in an older machine using SATAII, a newer machine using SATAIII or even in a USB 3.0 hard-drive dock, this is a solid drive that took a lot of abuse. When I settled on a machine I went from Windows 7 to Ubuntu, to MiNT to Windows 8 and finally to Windows 7/Ubuntu dual boot. This hard drive has been very good for me in the time I've had it. This would make a great storage drive for videos or other large files. Also, whether in my case or in a hard drive dock, I found this drive to be pretty cool.

Cons: My only issue was that it was slow when I transferred my Steam account(multiple small files intermixed with large ones) to the bigger hard drive. I was using it to transfer games,videos, etc I don't think this would work well as a primary due to the slow access time.

Overall Review: This would be a great storage drive for movies and music. I wouldn't recommend installing your Steam or Origin games on this as you'll probably want faster access times. I definitely wouldn't recommend this for an OS drive. BUT if you want a drive for videos, audio, etc, this makes a fantastic storage drive.