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: AIDA64 2.30

Similar to HD Tune, AIDA64′s built-in disk benchmarker is one of the easiest to run. The developer also keeps up on top of architectural trends so that you feel confident that the algorithms don’t get much better than this. This spreads beyond the storage benchmark, as AIDA64′s system stress-testers is one of the best, if not the best, out there – thanks to it being able to take full advantage of any given CPU architecture.

For our testing, we run both the read and write transfer suites. Because of the write test, we perform our benchmarking here on an unpartitioned drive.

AIDA64 2.30

Based on these results in conjunction with our HD Tune results, it’s clear that in all tests that don’t explicitly test a maximum throughput, the 4TB falls behind. The opposite is true with tests that do stress the throughput. That should mean that our real-world transfers should see very comparable performance from the 4TB versus the 2TB, so we’ll see if that plays out on the following page.

AIDA’s access time test complements the findings from HD Tune. It’s quite bizarre to see a Black drive being out-shined by a Green drive, isn’t it?


  • 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.