WD Black 4TB Performance Desktop Hard Disk Drive - 7200 RPM SATA 6 Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5 Inch - WD4003FZEX

1) Sliced the top of the anti-static bag and removed the drive 2) Powered down my rig and flipped the power switch on my power supply to off,cutting all the power to system components 3) Connected the drive via sata power connector and attached a new Sata data cable to the drive and motherboard port 4) Powered on the System, the drive was listed during bios post (AHCI mode was already enabled in my bios) 5) After being at the desktop (Windows 7 64bit) I went to Start/All Programs/Administrative Tools/Computer Management. Once it opened up I selected Disk Management under Storage and Selected this drive for formatting. I selected GPT,64K sectors,NTFS,Quick Format and this large 4TB drive was done almost instantly and this drive is ready for mass storage. 6) Disable indexing in drive properties, and never uncheck enable write caching on this device. That beats a drive down for such a small performance gain. This is the type and size of a drive that you will most likely need to be reliable and not benchmarking it 24/7. Disabled write caching is something for ssd drives only! 7) The only problem I did have and it's not the drive itself but a software driver issue that does involve this drive and windows, I should mention that I had to uninstall Intel Rapid Storage Technology AHCI driver because during large transfers it was consuming all of my ram first then stalling to finish copying data but luckily not locking up the OS, however it does lock up the copy so the only way to continue is to reboot, then uninstall the Intel RST driver,then reboot, then you should be able to copy terrabytes at a time without any locking up. It took me a few hours to figure out what it was because nothing on google seemed to report exactly the cause of locking up transfers, just reports of them. I think this is due to the fact that the drive actually has its own smart processor for transfers and buffering and RST just tries to get in the way of the drive and the motherboard. It seems that if you have AHCI on in the bios, then just let the windows driver and the drive do all the work, it is much more reliable however if you have good controller card drivers and have no problems then I recommend sticking to them as they will increase transfer speed as remain stable. When I mean mass storage I am talking about 16-32GB movie files both HD and 3D. That is why I selected 64K sectors. If you are planning on using this drive for smaller files and lost of them then I recommend 512 or 4096 byte sectors. Using large files and 64K sectors it will make seek times faster without working out the drive, plus it will also minimize fragmentation on the drive to almost nothing, however if you are storing lots of files smaller than 10GB then from 4-8GB range you should select 4096 and respectfully for mass amounts of photos you should select 512 or you will waste lots of space on this drive using 64K for random file types,sizes,etc. Don't worry too much about this drive having 5 platters and being slow or unreliable because of it. I've never actually heard this drive stress once and I've already loaded it with 2.4TB out of 3.63TB. Don't worry about this drive getting damaged due to vibration because its so large. -nonsense this drive has 3D adjustment mechanisms in place to adjust to the way the drive is positioned or adjust with environmental variables such as vibrations,trembling,etc -although you should mount this drive tightly as possible into a drive tray to take extra precautions to reduce vibrations and movement fluctuations just to be on the safe side. I actually had my drive laying on the bottom of my case with the circuit board facing up while I copyied 2.4TB from other drives to it and it never moved once but I'm waiting on a new pc case to arrive to make the new transition. I don't advise leaving this drive or any other drive unmounted and/or exposed longer than needed. This is my 4th WD Black Drive and 5th WD drive purchased altogether and I'm still satisfied as I've never had one to be DOA and I've never had any of them to crash. (knock on wood) I currently own: (1)1TB WD MyBook-WD 10EACS External USB Device (1)1TB WD Black-WDC WD1001FALS-00E8B0 SATA II (2)x1TB WD Black-WDC WD1001FALS-00J7B1 SATA II (1)4TB WD Black-WDC WD4003FZEX-00Z4SA0 SATA III

I will keep this one short and sweet because there aren't too many things to be said about a hard drive. It works. That's right folks it works. I plugged it in and there was no hassle involved. I bet a lot of you are wondering why that is even worth bringing up. Well in the hard drive market it is always a gamble of did I get a DOA HD or not. There is also the ever looming problems that come with installing any piece of hardware in a PC. If something can go wrong when installing something, it usually does. Well I can say this hard drive did not cause any problems. I plugged it in, seated it, and everything worked just as it should. Exactly as much memory available as expected and no hiccups. Speed. I have a solid state and this hard drive as my two drives. My OS is on the SDD and my games are on the HDD. I can honestly say that I haven't once considered putting any games on the solid state. Sure I could do it and it would be faster, but the speed at which this HDD operates has always been perfectly acceptable. The space. You are buying this hard drive so you don't have to worry about hard drive space for a good long time. Now I don't download 4k movies, but I do have a lot of games and this hard drive fits everything I could possible want on it and still have space for double that. You shouldn't have to ever worry about space with this monster of a drive. The price. A really solid price for a really solid product. It does what it says and that is all I could ever ask for. I cannot say enough good things about this product. I would not hesitate to recommend this to anyone in need of some space.

Been a steady user of the WD Black series. I usually upgrade every time I can buy a new one with double the capacity. So I've purchased a 1TB WD Black a few years ago, a 2TB WD Black two years ago, and just barely a 4TB WD Black. All of them have been reliable with no failures, and great performance. Transferring data to my new 4TB Black realized about 145 megabytes per second on average, which is pretty decent for a spindle drive. It has been a long time since I've used one for OS/application usage though. I definitely recommend an SSD to run your OS off of (I have a Samsung 840 SSD for that which I love). But for pure capacity and backup, the WD Black series at 4TB is king, and a great compromise of speed and capacity. I might get one more 4TB as a 1:1 backup of this one, since the larger these get, the more data I am at risk of losing if something goes wrong. I probably won't be back for an actual upgrade until I can get 8TB though. I'm pretty confident 4TB will give me a few years of room for growth though. No HDD is 100% free of occasional manufacturing defects or failures, but every WD Black I've owned is still running great, so I can easily recommend them to anyone looking for affordable storage.

It works great, but good heavens is it loud. I got this on New Year's Eve and both my wife and I thought the neighbors were setting off fireworks when we first heard this hard drive in operation. I have never had a drive this loud, even going back to the days of my 25 MHz Packard Bell that had a perpetually fragmented disk. I can count files it's writing from my GoPro as I write this because there is a loud clank from this disk for each one. Otherwise, this has been a great drive in the few days I've had it. I consistently get burst speeds of ~250MB/s and continuous speeds of ~150MB/s. That's about as good as it gets for a non-SSD.

This hard drive is great...but bit pricey for my taste honestly. Though I'd definitely say it's worth it if your as impatient with slow technology as I am. -The speed of the drive is impressive. I have my OS installed on my SSD to get fastest possible boot times(without going to the stupid expensive PCI-E solid state drives), and use this as the internal storage & install location of many games and programs. Flawless performance. -I used to be using my external USB 3 - 4TB HDD as my storage devices for games and programs, but it had noticeable issues. It had pretty similar transfer speeds, but it's seek times were alot longer and I don't think it liked being spun up for extended periods of time...which I needed for gaming/programs running on it. -I will say that this drive is fairly loud. I read that about the drive before I bought it, but know it wouldn't matter to me. But is sound is an issue for you, this might not be your best bet.

I've used Western Digital drives almost exclusively for years. I've only ever had one fail in that time and it was a 1TB drive, WD replaced that failed drive with a 2TB drive. The point is they stand behind their products and while they may not be the cheapest, or even always the fastest the fact you can reach a human and get your broken drive replaced is a huge plus. One you can't really put a price on. That being said, this drive is fast. It's performed beautiful for me since installing it and is plenty big enough. The fact it's a 7200 rpm drive is important. I've used slower spin rate drives and they just don't cut it. 7200rpm seems to be a sweet spot without having to cross over to the 10,000 and up RPM drives. Also I've found the drive to be quiet, but I admit my tower isn't the questest to begin with. But I haven't noticed that my computer has gotten any louder either. So take that however you will. Overall WD gets huge thumbs up and continues to be my go to for all my physical spinning hard drives. Conistant top performance and amazing warantee is hard to beat.

In my life I have probably purchased, formatted and installed more than 100 3.5 inch computer hard drives, starting back when these only came in a few megabytes. I had a couple that only lasted weeks. But this one didn't even work correctly for 2 hours. I installed this disk in a very high end Origin (the best!) desktop as a Windows 7 system backup disk. I had a 2tb Seagate disk in this same bay doing the same function (until it was full) and it performed flawlessly. I formatted this new disk in GPT as a simple volume using the default settings with Windows disk manager to get the full 4 (actually about 3.6) terabytes. Then I initiated a Windows backup with this as the target disk. After about an hour+, when the disk was about 5% full, a VERY loud screeching sound started coming from my tower. It didn't take rocket science to hear and feel the point source of the sound and vibration, apart from the fact that all my other hard drives are solid state, was this disk. I shut my system down, removed the disk, restarted and now all you hear are the fans again. The disk was warm, but not so hot that it couldn't be held, so it was not a heat issue. This disk has now set a new personal experience record as the worst. Of course, good old Amazon took it right back for a full refund in two seconds.

So far so good. Pretty good drive, but is noticeably slower than the 1tb WD velociraptor its replacing. I use this drive for a certain digital game platform (ummm hot water vapor) that has to many sales and needed more storage. I don't recommend this as a main os/boot drive (use a SSD for that), but it makes a great storage/game drive. So great drive but could be faster.

Die Festplatte ist technisch ok auch wenn es etwas lauter ist als eine Greenversion. Alles vertretbar aber was mich wirklich stört ist das Die Garantie im Falle eines falles nicht in Anspruch genommen werden kann. weil 1. Der Verkäufer niemandem eine Rechnung ausstellt und sonst auch es ihm sonstwo vorbei geht wenn die Käufer ihn diesbezüglich kontaktieren. 2. Ohne Rechnung/Kaufbeleg aber gibt es laut WD keinen Garantieanspruch durch Western Digital siehe auch Link unten Hinweis: Auszug Anfang: Der Zeitraum für Ihre begrenzte Garantie beginnt ab dem auf Ihrem Kaufbeleg von einem autorisierten Distributor oder Reseller angegebenen Kaufdatum und dauert nur bis zu dem in der Produktdokumentation angegebenen Termin. Um diese Garantie in Anspruch zu nehmen, ist ein Kaufbeleg und die Festlegung eines Anfangsdatums für diese Garantie erforderlich. Auszug Ende [...] 3. Diese und auch andere Festplatten werden wenn man deren Seriennummer für deutschland unter Garantieprüfen bei WD eingibt wird es korrekt idendifiziert aber Keine Garantieansprüche da es als "Außerhalb der Region / out of Region" eingestuft wird , also nichts mit 5 Jahre Garantie. da die festpllate für eine ander Region Bestimmt ist, diese Festpalte zumindest meine ist für die USA bestimmt. Also kann ich rechtlich niemanden belangen wenn es mal innerhalb der nächsten 5 Jahre den Geist aufgibt. Ich ahbe auch ganz viele WD Plattenvom heimischen PC Händler egkauft, diese werden auch für Deutschland indedifiziet und fallen in die Garantie. Anscheinend will Amazon wohl auch nichts davon hören und lesen drum werden auch Fragen und Rezensionen in dieser Hinsicht unmittelba kommentarlos gelöscht !!! Auch den Verkäufer mahnt Amazon wegen der fhlenden Rechnungen nicht Überprüft doch mal selbt Eure eigene Seriennumer der Platten und ihr werdet euch wundern !! [...] was soll man da machen , auch die andere 4TB Greenplatte von WD ist nur die Region der USA bestimmt. Wie sollman eine Grantieanspriuch AUS DEUTSCHLAND für einen Gerät geltend machen wenn man a. keine Rechnung hat und b. wenn die Platte ehe nicht für den deutschen Markt bestimmt is??? Möchte gerne Eure meinungen dazu hören ..

Le modèle Black est une référence en terme de fiabilité et ce disque dur 4 To ne fait pas exception à la règle. Il est rapide, immédiatement reconnu par le système d'exploitation (testé sous Windows 7 Ultimate x64 et Windows 10 Pro x64), facile à installer, et dispose d'une grande capacité de stockage. Le "plus" non négligeable en ce qui me concerne, est la garantie constructeur de 5 ans ! Pas de soucis à se faire sur l'avenir donc, et à mon sens il est préférable de dépenser quelques euros de plus pour privilégier la déclinaison "Black" des Western Digital, plutôt que de partir sur du "Green" ou du "Blue", et se retrouver au bout de 3 ans et demi avec un disque HS et une garantie constructeur terminée. A noter que Western Digital a annoncé fin août la sortie d'un modèle "Black" de 6 To, que l'on peut trouver à prix très raisonnable sur amazon.com, et très déraisonnable sur le marketplace d'amazon.fr ... attendons donc qu'Amazon propose cette déclinaison, pour l'avoir à un prix (enfin) abordable !

The fastest "IDE" drive you can get without going SSD or SCSI (or RAID). It works brilliantly as a mass storage device and I have most of my games on this drive, with an SSD being my OS and Applications drive. Games load quickly, some in a few seconds, and due to the size it is also a great Media dumping ground for music, movies, and photos. I think that in the price, size, performance triangle this drive is in the absolute sweet spot. Plus it's a Western Digital drive and they tend to be very very reliable and backed by a decent warranty.

Utilizzato come disco di archivio per steam, che dire... rispetto ai WD blue e rossi è sicuramente piu silenzioso, i caricamenti sono veloci, a due anni di utilizzo sono più che soddisfatto.

Ya llevo 3 años desde que compre este disco para mi PC gamer y hasta hoy no he experimentado ningún tipo de problema. Me compraría otro igual si tan solo me pudiera acabar esos 4 teras jaja