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

Bought on sale, used 24/7 for about 4 months at time of review Purchased this to replace my primary drive in a Dell computer that was killing every SSD I fed it. I have had reasonable luck with every hard drive I have owned, except when they were used in dell computers. This one seems to have broken the curse. A little noisier than some (head movement and platter spin whine) but most people will not notice if their computer case is closed. Good value for the money, I would purchase again

This is definitely CMR and not SMR (curse those who invented the latter). Id have preferred a 2.5 format, but this was the one on sale. And Im unclear that theres any difference between this and the WD 1TB _Red_ CMR HDD, but that the black is 7200_RPM, and the red 5400; as Im not noticing any excessive heat (I used an _unnecessary_ heatsink thats not worth the trouble to return), and my application doesnt care about the speed boost of 7200/5400, Im entirely satisfied.

Ive been gaming on PC for years and after six months can effectively say this one is solid for anything. the r/w speeds are always at steady 7k as advertised. Its very quiet and honestly preforms better than my other samsung ssds.

This review is for the 8 TB black hard drive. I have owned several different brands of hard drives and several different versions of WD’s hard drives over the years, including the greens, reds and purples. I have only have had one failure in that time, which happened to be worked hard, operating on a security camera server for a few years before failing. This is my first black as I wanted a reliable drive for backing up my desktop. These hard drives have a great 5-year warranty, which is one of the big reasons, I purchased this. I connected this drive to my Windows 10 computer with no issues. It took less than a minute to get setup and going. It was pre-formatted, so it was quick to a drive letter and get going. File transfer speeds are fairly speedy for a large size drive. I do think the drives are a bit pricey, but have come down in price over the last couple years. I currently have three of the black drives, this 8TB, a 6 and a 2TB....all have been reliable so far. Overall, other than being slightly pricey, these are great hard drives with good speeds and good warranty that I expect to be reliable over the long term. 4.5 stars

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.

UPDATE 3/26/15: This drive will make audible noises when accessing the data on the drive, but it gives pretty good speed. Even with the third replacement, it makes noises, so Ill just have to deal with it. The speed is pretty great. I wish this wasnt as loud as it is now. It sometimes bothers to hear the drive making access noise whenever I launch Adobe After Effects, but I can live with it. ~Simon. UPDATE 3/17/15: I received the replacement drive to find out that it has a similar (ticking sound while accessing data) symptom. I resorted to calling the WD Customer Support. The customer service representative was really helpful. He told me that the problem might be the bad cable. I switched the older SATA cable with a newer SATA cable I happened to have on the computer to find the problem still existing, so I told him about it. The support said he will send me a third replacement drive since both of the hard drives are giving me the same problems. I was a little conflicted because that meant I will have to pay for an extra return label. I voiced my concerns to the support, and the support said he will make me prepaid shipping labels--two labels--for the two (maybe not-so defective) drives I have to return. Also, the some complicated and strict return instructions happened to be for the people returning hard drives in a bulk. Im just an end-user, so the support clarified that I can just return the hard drives in the original packaging. So, people, web replacement support may sound more convenient, but calling the tech support proved to be much better. At least for me and my situation. If any of you have some noisy drives, try switching the SATA cable to a newer one. Apparently, this drive works better and tolerably quieter with a newer SATA cable (thus, the two drives I have to return may not be defective). ~Simon End of update. Old review below. == Edit Start == Well, I think I gave a horrible rating at the beginning, but bad start is a bad start, I guess. At least the clicking drive worked. The shipping fee I have to pay for returning is around 7 dollars, which was what threw me off. Also, the billing address have to be the same as replacement shipping address. That also threw me off, deducting one whole star. Anyways, I hope no more problem exists with this new drive they sent me. == Edit End == This drive works, but its making abnormally loud clicking noises whenever it is reading off or writing on the disk. Its so much louder than my other (regular) hard drives I dont feel safe using Adobe After Effects with this drive. I submitted a replacement request through WDs website, but the steps there is just horribly laid out. Its not easy navigating through the website for support. Also, you have to pay the shipping fee for replacing the already defective product with WD. Also, WD is practicing some complicated and strict return instructions. I mean, come on! You shipped the clicking drive at the first place!

Working for intended use, moved from 5tb to 8tb… drive is almost full… black line needs some larger sizes.

Some people might find it stupid to buy a drive like this just for storage but after trying a couple of other brands and dealing with crap like SMR and loud and flat out defective drives from other brands its worth it in my opinion. This drive is pretty loud when seeking but is silent otherwise and I can deal with that. Im happy I was able to finally get a decent drive.

I needed a little more storage space for my gaming system and didnt want to reinstall the OS. I decided on this drive as Ive had good luck with them in the pass. This time I selected the 2 TB Black drive mainly due to the 7200 rpm speed and it would go well to replace a 160 gig drive I had a few things on. (Turned out I had more on there than I thought.) Anyway, installation was a matter of pulling the SATA Blue Ray burner out and then moving the old drive to the slot the Blue Ray had been in, which I did after taking the system into my work table in the kitchen where I do all my in case work. I did the switch as the old drive had stuff on it I wanted moved to the new drive. Once I got the new drive installed, I laid the old drive on top of the new drive after placing some cardboard in between to make sure the old drive wouldnt contact the old one and possibly cause a short. I then plugged up everything (KB, mouse, monitor, etc..), and cranked up Windows to activate the new drive and format it. These two things went off without a hitch and after changing the drive letter on the old drive to F, as I had four drive on of the system, and changing the new drives letter to E, as the old one had been, I proceeded to move all the folders one at a time from the old drive to the new drive. by using cut and paste. Since the old drive had a number of item that werent installed but merely copied to the drive this went fairly speedily until I got to the Program Files (x86) folder which turned out to be 101 gigs in size. An hour later, I had it all moved without a single error being reported. After checking the new drive by running a few things from it and making sure that all had copied off OK, I formatted the old drive and powered down the system and removed it and reinstalled the Blue Ray burner again and cranked things up again. The system came up running without a problem and the new 2 TB drive is now running as drive E on a three HD with burner system. I moved the system back into the Computer Room and hooked it up and so far alls well. I have gotten good results with WD drives and if I have to replace a drive or upgrade one to a larger capacity I usual get WDs. An increase in storage space and well worth the price.

Perfect