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

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.

1) Sliced the top of the anti-static bag and removed the drive2) Powered down my rig and flipped the power switch on my power supply to off,cutting all the power to system components3) Connected the drive via sata power connector and attached a new Sata data cable to the drive and motherboard port4) 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

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.

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.