WD Black 4TB Hard Drive Review

by Rob Williams on January 2, 2013 in 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.

Page 5 – 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.

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?

Page List:

Top

1. Introduction
2. Test System & Methodology
3. Synthetic: PCMark 7
4. Synthetic: HD Tune Pro 5.0 & Iometer 1.1.0
5. Synthetic: AIDA64 2.30
6. Real-World: Transfers, Game Level Loading & Windows Boot
7. Final Thoughts

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Rob Williams

Rob founded Techgage in 2005 to be an 'Advocate of the consumer', focusing on fair reviews and keeping people apprised of news in the tech world. Catering to both enthusiasts and businesses alike; from desktop gaming to professional workstations, and all the supporting software.