WD Black 4TB Hard Drive Review
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by Rob Williams on January 2, 2013 in Hard Drives, Storage

WD’s Black 4TB is the sort of product that doesn’t need much of an introduction – it speaks for itself. We’re dealing with a standard-sized desktop hard drive that sports a market-leading 4TB of storage. That’s 4,000GB, for those not paying enough attention. It’s impressive on paper, so let’s see how it fares in our benchmarks.

Synthetic: PCMark 7

Futuremark’s PCMark benchmarking suite should need no introduction – it’s been a staple of PC benchmarking for the better half of a decade. PCMark offers a range of tests to gauge every aspect of a computer’s performance and presents it in a neat simple final result. Thankfully, it also breaks down the overall score with individual subsystem scores (such as Memory, Storage, etc) in addition to given individual test results.

As we’re not too concerned with the performance of the PC as a whole, for our testing here we deselect all default tests and run only the “Secondary Storage” suite, with the hard drive in question as the chosen drive. Tests in this suite range from the loading of applications, running a Windows Defender scan, editing video, gaming and more.

PCMark 7 Professional

It’s a good thing I’m not a betting man, because I would have guessed without hesitation that WD’s Black 4TB would perform better than the 2TB model. Instead, we see it fall behind in each test, and fairly significantly “overall” (~9%). This is likely due to the fact that WD specced the 4TB model with 5 platters (800GB) rather than 4 like the 2TB model has. If WD was able to implement 1TB platters like is featured in the NAS-focused Red drives, we very likely would have seen a completely different outcome here.

Let’s see if our other tests back PCMark’s findings up.


  • http://techgage.com/ Brett Thomas

    I’ll still stick to my green 2TBs in my server arrays for now – RAID5 more than offsets the performance concerns. This drive would be a go-to if I needed the storage/space balance in such a large size, but who NEEDS their “working” drive to be 4TB? I’d rather have a 3-tier model for a full desktop – SSD for the OS, Raptor for a working drive, and a large and slow one for long-term storage.

    What are the warranty differences between the top brand WD black and the HGST drive? May account for the $20. WD’s warranty service has always been spectacular, I’m not sure about its subsidiaries.

    • http://www.facebook.com/deathspawner Rob Williams

      The HGST drive carries the same 5-year warranty. I can agree that most people won’t need a 4TB drive, but for those needing to maximize their storage potential, it’s a great option. A four-bay NAS that supports 4TB drives would offer 12TB of storage space – that’s pretty damn attractive. The fact that WD doesn’t really charge a premium for these beefy drives is what can make them a good investment. Though the HGST is an even better value on paper.