WD Black 4TB Desktop HDD Review

We got our hands on Western Digital’s flagship High Performance/High Storage HDD, their Black 4TB WD4003FZEX. And boy is it impressive.

First things first, let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way: You can buy two forms of storage these days: SSDs and HDDs. SSDs are blazing fast and leave HDDs in the dust performance wise but cost a lot more too, while HDDs are typically slower but come in massive capacities.

So obviously the Black doesn’t compare to SSDs in terms of raw performance. It’s strength lies in the performance it shows seen alongside its four freaking terabyte capacity

Now, with that out of the way, let’s dig in, shall we?

Build Quality

The Black is virtually indistinguishable from other WD consumer drives if you ignore the label. Absolutely nothing gives away the massive capacity that the unassuming metal facade hides. But when you pick it up, you can tell one thing: the drive is built to last. The top is metal and as with other Caviar drives, acts as a heat spreader for the actual physical platters. WD has installed dampening material between the drive and the PCB which increases it’s lifespan. The drive has five platters of 800 Gigabytes each, which spin at 7,200RPM.

And if all this is not enough for you (you cheeky enthusiast, you, with your SLIs and watercooling) WD also provides a five year warrenty to go with your spanking new 4TB drive.

Performance

The first thing we noted right out of the box was that the Black is noticeably faster than WD Red, Green and Blue even though the Blue operates at the same spindle speed as the Black, which goes some way in justifying the premium over it’s NAS and Consumer grade cousins.  As for noise, it’s not quite whisper quiet, but it’s close. You can barely hear it spinning up with the case closed. Power consumption is stellar as well: barely a watt is consumed in Standby and during stress testing, the power consumption rose to between 8 to 8.3 watts.

Here are the cold hard numbers from the benchmarks:

Summary:

The drive performs reasonably well, exceptionally even, considering it has actual spinning bits and magnets in it. Now where this drive excels is it’s massive capacity: four terabytes for about ₹17,000 or less if you find a good deal. That is cheap considering it’s way faster than a comparable WD Red or Green drive but is still a pretty penny. So this drive is probably not targeted at consumers. One thing that stands out is the warranty period: WD provides a five year warranty on this drive. So it’s targeted towards enterprises too along with enthusiasts who think RAIDing up a crapton of SSDs for massive storage is stupid/dangerous/risky/unstable and not worth it. And that is just peachy: You get a ridiculous amount of HDD space for comparatively less money than it would take to buy multiple smaller capacity and/or slower drives with the Black 4TB.

Tech Specs

Model: WD4003FZEX
Capacity: 4TB (five x 800GB platters)
Interface: SATA 6 Gb/s
Rotational Speed: 7,200 RPM (nominal)
Buffer Size: 64 MB
Load/unload Cycles: 300,000 minimum
Buffer To Host (Serial ATA): 6 Gb/s (Max)
Formatted Capacity: 4,000,787 MB
User Sectors Per Drive: 7,814,037,168

Physical Dimensions
Height 26.1 mm
Depth 147 mm
Width 101.6 mm
Weight: 0.78 kg

Environmental Specifications
Shock
Operating Shock (Read): 30G, 2 ms
Non-operating Shock: 300G, 2 ms

Acoustics
Idle Mode: 29 dBA (average)
Seek Mode 0: 34 dBA (average)

Temperature
Operating: 32° F to 140° F
Non-operating: -40° F to 158° F

Power Dissipation
Read/Write: 9.50 Watts
Idle: 8.10 Watts
Standby: 1.30 Watts
Sleep: 1.30 Watts

Warranty: 5 year

Besides, WD Black sounds cool when you say it. Like an Italian mobster shark who rides in a 1960s Cadillac as opposed to your sensible Blue which sounds like a harried middle manager driving about in a station wagon. And Green sounds Hippy. And Red is a 14 year old who spouts memes in public. Just my two cents. What was I supposed to do again?

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