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

It works as intended so its worth in my opinion.

Ive used nothing but WD drives for over 30 years. First one was a tiny 240MB drive and since have been through many upgrades. While most were due to outgrowing the drives, Ive had maybe 2 catastrophic failures. I had a few drives start to go bad developing bad sectors but were caught in time to preserve data on a backup drive. While I know SSD is the thing now and is my preference for sure for a laptop, I do not find them to be a great advantage for sustained transfers like backing up or cloning a HD. SSD rates are initially very high then slow down after a few seconds. So for a while I will stick with spinning platters. This particular model is very fast rivaling SSD transfers for routine writes to another section of drive, as fast as my SSD laptop is.

Its amazing how cheap you can get high capacity hard drives nowadays. I love the high storage capabilities while not being extremely slow like many hard drives. Dont get me wrong a ssd is several times faster but the prices of high storage ssds are just depressing. Until you can get a reasonable priced high capacity ssd, this is perfect for bulk storage on a main device, it is fast enough to game and do daily tasks though I wouldnt recommend using this as your primary drive but rather a secondary with a ssd for booting and important files and this drive for anything else

Installed easily in my HP Envy desktop.

I added this to a ThinkStation P390 with ease. The SSD and the 4TB platter drive I got in the bundle have given me adequate storage for my 3D / Digital art content. That said, Ive trusted Western Digital/WD drives for years and am very happy with this purchase.

5/23/14 This WD Black 1TB is used as my primary data drive. I use a Kingston SSD as my O.S. / application drive. Win7 volume creation and format went without a hitch. The xfer of ~500GB data from my WD Red drive to this new WD Black drive went smoothly. This new Black drive has much faster read speed and very respectable write speed compared to other 7200rpm SATA drives I have used thus far. I also noticed that when I booted to win7 from it (I loaded a backup boot partition in case my SSD failed) the speed was impressive. No, not nearly as fast as my SSD but much faster than my backup WDSE and WDRed NAS drives which are also 7200RPM SATA3. Ive had Seagate 7200 RPM SATA3 drives which are not quite as nimble. Alas, it was all too good to be true:( My super speedy Black drive started clicking & chunking after appx. 2.5 mos. Hey ... This happens sometimes with hard drives ... ok, no big deal, the drive came with a 3yr. Wd warranty. This is where the fun started: Went to WD website and spent appx. 1/2hr. in RMA process. Very easy. Sent my RMA drive back via UPS label I printed from WD website (very convenient). After appx. 7 days I checked the RMA status on the WD website. WHAT??? The model# I sent them does not match the model# they are sending me. I looked up the model# they were sending me and it was the slower / cheaper Blue hdd with only 1yr warranty. I called WD to confirm. They answered the call after a few min of going thru the phone tree. The person I spoke to was very polite and spoke with no language accent issues. He said they didnt have any Black drives to send so they sent the Blue. I tactfully let him know this was not acceptable and requested a WD Red or SE drive as a replacement. You would think I was asking the United States Congress to agree on something. I have talked to 3 different reps on 3 separate phone calls with no resolution. I have had numerous business dealings with WD in the past. I was in network I.T. for over 20yrs. I have never gone through this much trouble with WD. Politely offering no resolution after hours of my time does not cut it with me. All this over a $90 hdd. Ill update when the issue is finally resolved. UPDATE 5/28/14 I called the corporate WD cust. svc. line this morning. The operator was very helpful and made sure I was connected to a live person, not voice mail. The Customer Service rep was very polite and sympathetic, but most important he resolved the issue within 30 min. The only reason it took even that long was because we were searching for an appropriate replacement drive I would be happy with since they had no (Black) drives to send me. I couldnt believe he actually offered a very generous upgrade for my time and inconvenience, which I of course accepted. I have always thought very highly of WD products. My faith in WD service is restored. I cannot upgrade the stars on my review because I am not receiving a (Black) hdd. I will give WD as a company a very favorable rating and will not hesitate to purchase from WD in the future. Update 5/29/14 My replacement drive arrived today, ahead of schedule. The drive is installed as my primary data drive and is loading as I write this. The drive is everything WD promised. I am a happy camper:) Update 11/25/14 Since my initial review I have added the following Western Digital hard drives to my systems: (2) 4TB SE NAS enterprise class 7200rpm (1) 4TB Green 5400rpm (2) 1TB Velociraptors 10,000 rpm All my W.D. drives are performing well 24x7. I run full Lifeguard diags on them once per week and have had no issues. The point is: Western Digital hard drives, as a whole, perform very well under very demanding conditions. I am chalking up the initial issue I had with the Western Digital service department as a one time fluke. They really did go out of their way to make it right. UPDATE 6/16/16 Since there are quite a few hits / comments on this review I thought I would supply a quick update All my WD drives from 2014 are still running great:) 24 x 7. UPDATE 4/6/18 Since there are quite a few hits / comments on this review I thought I would supply a quick update Green drive failed last month. WD sent replacement with no hassles and quick ship processing All other WD drives from 2014 are still running great:) 24 x 7. Thank you all for your comments. I am happy to have been helpful:)

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

A recurring problem. . . phantom behavior. Another customer review sums up my experience: Jeremy 1.0 out of 5 stars Be VERY cautious purchasing this item. Reviewed in the United States on August 19, 2019 Verified Purchase I initially purchased this hard drive for my top of the line custom PC build. I had an expert put together my PC (i9 9900K, RTX 2080TI, Two 2 TB NVMe 970 EVO SSDs, MSI MEG Z390 ACE MB). Initially when I brought the PC home, everything was fine. This WD hard drive was storing a couple TB of my gaming clips and I had no complaints. After a week or so, I noticed my HDD was no longer listed in my drive list. I troubleshot the issue and wasnt able to figure out what was wrong. I gave up for a few days and noticed that all of the sudden, the hard drive was back in my list of drives. I hadnt done anything I know of to cause this. This off-an-on appearance of the drive happened several times until I contacted the professional who put together my PC - he told me that it was a defective drive and to return it for a replacement. I did this and received the same HDD as a replacement item. Almost immediately after installing the new HDD I noticed once again that it wasnt appearing in my list of available drives. Again it began to show up sporadically. At this point I figured it must be a problem with my setup or some other faulty component. I troubleshot this issue EXTENSIVELY. It finally came to the point where I completely uninstalled everything and installed a brand new motherboard myself. I was very excited to see that after I plugged everything in and booted up, my hard drive was listed in my drives. I had thought I fixed the issue, but then the next day the drive had disappeared again. I ordered a second, but am cancelling the second now, until I see more time with the first one. AUG 29, 2021 Update: I did cancel the second drive ordered. I have found no ASUS ROG Maximus with WiFi MB with i9 9000K EUFI changes corrects the problem, it remains a dynamic drive - sometimes visible, and sometimes not! Too much money for such an unreliable hard drive.

Working good after 1500 hours so far: smartctrl -a /dev/sdd: ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x002f 200 200 051 Pre-fail Always - 0 3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0027 175 174 021 Pre-fail Always - 2250 4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 246 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always - 0 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x002e 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 099 099 000 Old_age Always - 1446 10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 106 192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 247 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 111 103 000 Old_age Always - 32 196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 200 200 000 Old_age Offline - 0 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0008 200 200 000 Old_age Offline - 0 user:~# sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/sdd /dev/sdd: Timing cached reads: 7414 MB in 2.00 seconds = 3708.38 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 514 MB in 3.01 seconds = 171.04 MB/sec user:~#