Review of the WD Black 4 TB Desktop Hard Drive

With storage requirements becoming bigger and bigger all the time, WD have a 4 TB drive in their Black range, and here is our review.

WD Black hard drives are designed for enthusiasts and creative professionals looking for leading-edge performance. These 3.5-inch desktop drives are perfect for high-performance applications like photo and video editing, gaming and power PCs.

• Dual processor – Twice the processing power to maximize performance
• Colossal cache – Bigger, faster cache of up to 64 MB means faster performance
• Dual actuator technology – A head positioning system with two actuators that improves positional accuracy over the data track(s). The primary actuator provides coarse displacement using conventional electromagnetic actuator principles. The secondary actuator uses piezoelectric motion to fine tune the head positioning to a higher degree of accuracy
• StableTrac – The motor shaft is secured at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking, during read and write operations
• NoTouch ramp load technology – The recording head never touches the disk media ensuring significantly less wear to the recording head and media as well as better drive protection in transit

Who are WD?

From their website:

We are thousands of people worldwide working to enable you to store, collect, access, and use a vast and growing body of digital information. Our reliable hard drives and solid state drives, marketed under the WD and HGST brands, are everywhere that digital information and content is found: in the cloud, supporting your mobile digital lifestyle; in business and personal computers; in external storage devices; in the digital video recorder in your home; and in sophisticated medical, military, aerospace, automotive, manufacturing and telecommunications systems. We also make media players that enable you to enjoy your digital content on the biggest screen in your house – your TV. Our customers range from some of the largest companies in the world to individual users like you.

Specifications

A Closer Look at the Drive

Using the Drive

I connected the drive to my Windows 8 machine:

If you use the drive as your primary hard disk, Windows Experience rates it as as 5.9.

Performance Tests

HD Tune Pro

The average read speed was 127.1 MB/s.

The average write speed was 128.5 MB/s.

CrystalDiskMark

Showed a higher read and write speed.

Final Thoughts

The WD Black drive comes in a variety of sizes from 500 GB all the way up to the 4 TB version we are reviewing here.

This is one of the only 4 TB drives on the market today so if you need a lot of storage, and a good speed (7,200 RPM) then you really should look at this drive closely.

Also, this is the only 4 TB drive on the market that comes with a 5 year warranty. Now this may not seem like a major selling point to some people but believe me over the years I have had my fair share of failed drives and so it’s nice to know that anytime during that 5 year period WD will replace my drive if I have a problem – after all, you are spending a lot of money on it!

WD’s dynamic caching algorithm improves performance in real time by optimizing cache allocation between reads and writes. For example, if there’s an overwhelming percentage of read traffic as opposed to write traffic, the drive automatically allocates more cache for read data, which reduces congestion and improves overall drive performance.

The performance of the drive is very good – although if you are looking for a super fast boot drive for Windows then you might want to look elsewhere, but if you want a reliable, good performing storage drive then this will be right up your alley.

The retail price for the 4 TB drive is around £229.99 but as usual look around for a good deal, and that price should soon drop as more companies release higher capacity drives.

Learn more from the WD website.