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

Its a WD Black. That should be enough said, but for the sake of clarity let me explain: Ive owned/recommended several WD black drives since around 2010 and never had ANY issues with them, even well past their warranty period. I still have two old 1TBs that work good as new. All WD black drives Ive dealt with have been rock solid reliable. Cant say the same about some competitors or even other WD product lines. Heres to hoping this (8TB) drive carries on the torch for many years to come! Ive read some complaints online about noise, and initially was concerned about it. I am happy to report that this thing is very quiet! No clicking, whirring, ticking or loud seeking noise when reading or writing to it. When backing stuff up to it all I heard was some faint seeking noise, and not much at that. Performance? Its reasonably fast. Its no SSD, but its no slouch either. Faster than some other HDDs I have lying around. To get a decent idea of its performance, see the attached screenshot. (Benchmark is from CrystalDiskMark 8.0.4 using Default profile). Would I recommend this over other drives? Absolutely. Would I buy more of this same drive? Of course! Overall 10/10 hard drive.

If you need storage, this drive works well. Fastest sata drive out there. Not the best choice for newer games, you would want an ssd or m.2, but a lot of games will still run off this. Not to mention so much room to save movies, music, backups, etc. Very good addition to any pc.

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

Had a 2G SSD and 2G SATA in my Dell XPS 8940. My second drive was constantly getting full from Backup. This is a nice drive pretty fast and good price. It is a bit loud when my Diskkeeper program is running on the drive but normal operation is fine.

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.

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.

Great price and good storage. The drive is a little louder than I like. It isnt loud per say, but it is louder than the other components in my computer. You can hear it spin up and it occasionally...clicks...that isnt quite a good description but it is almost like you can hear the head reposition on the drive.

What you see is what you get. They also give you the latest manufactured hdd. Shipped early and packed well. Worth the buy! I consider to buy here again. Very recommended!

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!

This drive was basically DOA. As part of a new Win10 build it would not keep operating. After as few as 15 minutes the system would crash. It took two attempts to even load the OS. Going into the BIOS the drive was not shown, although the other storage drives were. Changing SATA slots and cables on the new ASUS Z10A mobo made no difference as did changing power cables and ports on the new EVGA 750 PSU. BIOS updates did nothing to improve the situation. I reinstalled the OS on an older spare Hitachi HDD [fortunately I bought a Retail Win10 Pro] and it ran flawlessly. After several weeks I decided to clone the system on to this HDD and see what happens. It lasted less than a day before a fatal crash and the BIOS once again reported it was not there. I hate problems like this because it takes sooo freaking long to figure out that something is terribly wrong and now, according to Amazon, after only a month I cannot return this POS. UPDATE***********12/1/16 FANTASTIC WESTERN DIGITAL CUSTOMER SERVICE! *************** Since Amazon would not accept a return I had to deal with the Western Digital RMA process. Talk about simple! I only had to register the product online and then request an RMA. I received no less than two emails and two telephone calls from an actual US Resident inquiring about the problems I had. In two days they sent an email with a PREPAID shipping label. I received a new HDD in three days [they had already shipped the return prior to receiving mine]. Surprise of all was that it was a 4TB version instead of the 2TB I purchased and returned. So far the new HDD is running without problems. I surmise that the original HDD had problems with the SATA interface, which wouldnt show up on a normal Diagnostic Test.