Western Digital 4TB WD Black Performance Internal Hard Drive HDD - 7200 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, 256 MB Cache, 3.5 - WD4005FZBX

This drive replaces the older WD model: WD6002FZWX. I attempted to buy the older model as a brand new item on eBay, since that is the model I was replacing, and I wanted to replace it with the same make/model. However, the seller sent to me a used item instead. I had to do a return, and then wait around for a refund. Then I went to Amazon to buy the newer model WD6004FZWX - and Im happy with this purchase. The drive from Amazon has zero hours of use, and only 1 turn-on - as checked by my hard disk diagnostic software - so the drive is definitely new. The one from Amazon is quiet, fast, and reliable - and comes with a five year factory warranty, which I verified by going to the Western Digital website, and checking the serial number of my drive with their warranty lookup service. This is a good hard drive for the money - and I should have gone to Amazon first - instead of wasting my time elsewhere, trying to find an older/discontinued drive model as a new item.

Although I am not a gamer, I bought this gaming edition because I like the extra cache (256 MB). Drive has good throughput: both read speed 250 MB/s and write speed 225 MB/s. This was using an external enclosure with USB 3 connection (eSATA connection yielded slightly higher throughput in both read and write). I also like WDs 5 year warranty (as opposed to standard 2 or 3 year on other drives). Since the 1980s, a have mostly used WD drives in my many various builds over the years and they have never disappointed me. (I have extra drives laying around that are over 15 years old (these are smaller capacity SATA1 and SATA 2 drives) and they all still work good. Recommend this drive for anyone looking for decent performance at a decent price. Only one caveat: This drive tends to run hotter then the WD Blue drives, but still within manufacturers specs. So if you plan to use this drive in an external enclosure, be sure the enclosure has a fan, or at the very least is well cross-ventilated. If you put this in a fully enclosed fan-less enclosure, it WILL get hot.

Excellent product. Fast shipping. One informational caveat: Did not initially work for me, due to a power requirement I had not noticed before. I installed this in a 10-year-old Linux-based DVR system, and initially it would not recognize the drive. Learned that my power supply (12V 3A) was under-powered for this drive, in this system. Upgraded to 5A P/S, and drive now works fine.

Well, my last WD Black drive only lasted 2 years, but thats the nice thing about the 5-year warranty. I got this one as a mirror. The old drive started chattering loudly at 100% utilization during virus scans and backups about halfway through its short 2-year lifespan. One day it finally failed - first disconnected itself, and then when I reconnected, it appeared as EMPTY. I first tried scandisk, and it fixed errors, but the disk now showed as full. I ran the free WD Diagnostics and it failed the short test, then on the long test, confirmed it had too many bad sectors to recover. I read online to run chkdsk and do the full surface scan. It took 2 days to chug through the drive, but I got almost everything back. I had a backup drive copy, too, but I had a couple of things from that day that werent backed-up...like my TurboTax file, which was almost complete (Murphys law). I got back the most important files, bought this newer version of the same drive (the free replacement is now its mirror), and restored everything else from backup. This drive (and the replacement for my F1002 model) are running perfectly well, and I cant hear them over the fans, which is a nice change. I have one piece of advice when buying drives: get the highest rated drive with the longest warranty possible that you can afford. I got this one on sale. I thought about the 2TB or even 3TB versions, but I already have a 240GB SSD boot drive, and another 1GB drive (a Seagate that was a replacement for one that lasted 2 weeks - this one is a lucky one...I can tell :). Not to mention, 5TB of external drives, and a 3TB NAS, so why risk a bigger drive? Bottom line: good drive - fast, and quiet, and I sleep better with a 5yr warranty and a good backup!

I had high expectations when it came to this drive. My solid state was getting a little full and I was no where near done downloading files. I purchased this to more or less take over as the main drive for my files and archives and let the solid state take care of the OS. Now, why did I buy this rather than say the VelociRaptor? Well, for one, I wanted 2TB and the Raptor doesnt provide anything more than 1TB. Two, the Black is only 15% slower. To put that in some perspective, the 1TB black is ~$75 while the Raptor is ~$205; 273% cost increase for 15% more performance doesnt make much sense to me. So, lets talk about that speed. I will post CrystalDiskMark benchmark for those who love looking at those numbers, but I like to use my butt dyno as my test. Coming from the SSD, I could definitely see the difference in load times, program start-ups, image rendering, model rotating, and yata yata. With all that said, I have never felt the need to yell at my computer to hurry up; everything still moves at a quick pace that satisfies what I need. The next thing on the list is noise. I have eight fans in my case that is a foot and a half from my head. The only time I can actually hear the drive working is when I first open a program such as SolidWorks or BeamNG Drive. Even while doing the benchmark it was quiet. So, unless your computer has no fans and is close to your face, you shouldnt hear too much grunting from this guy. At any rate, this is a great drive if you need the space and speed and just cant find the want to fork out the big bucks.

I build computers and servers for a hobby and I repair the computers for my friends and family. In my experience the highest failure items on a computer is the mechanical hard drive and then the cooling fans. Based on that I try to purchase higher quality drives to avoid the time and money wasted troubleshooting and replacing defective drives. This Western Digital Black drive is one of the good ones. I use the 2 TB versions in servers and I have had a good experience with them. I just purchased 4 more of these and I think they are a good drive. They also are one of the few that still have a 5 year warranty on them. Many drive makers are lowering the warranty period on their drives and at one time many of them had 5 year warranties. Now I am seeing 1 to 3 year warranties. I gave these drives a 5 star rating. That doesnt mean they will not fail as they all do. They just seem to last longer. I have used hundreds of Seagate, Toshiba, Western Digital and other brands of drives. The best last 5 years and the worst didnt work out of the new box. These drives came nicely packaged and sealed in the box and inside of a factory sealed static discharge bag so you know you are not getting someones returned drive. You can download Acronis True Image WD Edition for free from the WD site to clone your current system drive. You can also download the Data Lifeguard Diagnostic software for free from WD to test you drives. These are good drives and I like the quality. I rated them 5 stars.

not healthy sounds. its been almost 6 months, never really used it until recently since I have like 10TB worth of storage (as well as this 6TB HDD). Now that I am starting to put things on it, it is making a lot of clicking noises and when I scroll through the pictures I have stored on it and when I scroll they will no load until I hear it wind up and start spinning, then it will load them. While scrolling through the pictures every few lines it loads while going down the list, I can hear it going click, click, click, clickclickclick, click. noises that shouldnt be heard. and for a WD Black HDD the quality should be way above my 4TB WD Blue HDD, which doesnt make any of the sounds this one is (as it should). and since I waited to use it until it was actually needed Im well past my return window and 1 month past the click here for support option. If you happen to buy this test it as soon as you get it by uploading deleting and accessing large # of files on it, to test the waters and see how it reacts and sounds. Im not saying dont buy this, Im say dont do what I did and wait until you actually need it before using it and realizing its not as it should be 100%.

I have been buying Western Digital drives for decades now and have had excellent drive life and reliability. This 4 TB Black model drive has started out like others I have had in the past. I got this drive to replace a WD Blue 1 TB drive that is now too small for my needs, but is still performing well. Low noise level and excellent access speeds have continued with the 4TB WD Black model. If I have any issues, Ill update this review.

I just opted for a refund today, as this drive failed in less than a year. It took me so long to return it because I needed the storage and I could sort of bypass errors and repair failures. Today the drive became completely unstable, I couldnt even open file explorer to transfer some of the files I needed to my other storage devices without my entire system crashing. Why do I ask if we are getting rejects, well I included pictures of why I think this. When I bought this product last June I dont think there were pictures of the faceplate and when I got the item with the exposed interface board, I just assumed that was part of the design; after all, there are plenty of exposed components in a PC. Plus I needed the storage and it worked fine for a while, so I still just believed everything was fine. However, a few months later I started having problems. I got errors in BIOS, startup was generally slower and sometimes wouldnt ever stop loading. Eventually, the drive would no longer show up in the middle of using it causing crashes, and most commonly disk write errors on steam. Obviously it completely failed today, losing me about 3.5TB of data. Now, I give this a 3 star rating because of Amazons return policy. Because I was able to process a refund so quickly and with no hassle, technically the issue was resolved, but the item itself is still either defective, or the manufacturers are supplying Amazon with their QA failures. My latter hypothesis stems from other products Ive returned and gotten replacements directly from the manufacturer. Typically, the defects I get from Amazon fail rather quickly, and when they are replaced by the supplier, they are of noticeably higher quality and last longer. In this case, I was apparently missing face plate (the now first product picture that has WD_Black and 3.5 gaming HDD stylized and engraved on it. Thats kind of an obvious discrepancy. I digress. The drive worked great when it worked, very fast and high capacity. I never noticed any noise either, but I also have my fans on full blast (I live in Phoenix, things already get hot for just existing here), so I dont mind noise as long as performance and safety are excelling. Maybe Ill give this item another go since the Barracudas are apparently SMR and not actually 7200RPM but 5400RPM, which is outwardly deceitful, and I think 4k sectors are better.

You cant beat Western Digital hdds in my opinion. So far this hdd for gaming has lived up to beyond what i expected.