Western Digital 4TB Black Review

Western Digital has neatly demarcated its internal hard drive lineup and the Black series denotes its highest end consumer series drives. With rotational speeds touching 7200 RPM, the Black series of WD drives are second only to the enterprise level WD Velociraptors which spin at 10,000 RPM. WD brought its 4TB Black series drive - the Western Digital 4TB Black - quite late to the Indian market as compared to its international release. Let’s see if it’s worth the hefty price tag.   Features [caption id=“attachment_207943” align=“aligncenter” width=“720”]  The WD 4TB Black has a 5 platter design and a 7200 RPM rotational speed[/caption]   The Western Digital 4001FAEX is a 4TB drive having a SATA 6 Gbps interface and 64MB of cache. This drive features a five platter design. Within the Black series, WD has capacities ranging from 500GB, 1TB and 2TB. Like we said in the beginning, the WD4001FAEX is the only Black series drive available in India in the 4TB capacity, but internationally the latest model of the 4TB drive is the WD4003FZEX. The WD4001FAEX comes with a 7200 RPM rotational speed. [caption id=“attachment_207937” align=“aligncenter” width=“724”]  The WD 4TB Black comes with SATA 6 Gbps interface[/caption]   Test Setup Processor: Intel Core i7-4770K Motherboard: ASRock Z87M Extreme4 RAM: 2 x 4GB GSkill RipjawsX OS Drive: Intel SSD, 80GB Source Drive: Corsair Neutron GTX, 240GB SSD PSU: Cooler Master 800W Silent Pro Gold OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit   Performance We’ve tried to use a healthy number of synthetic as well as real-world tests to give you a better idea of the performance. With hard drive tests, no two runs of the same test will give you exactly the same score, so we run three instances of the same test and then average out the scores to be on the safer side. ATTO Benchmark gave a sequential read score of 150.24MB/s and a sequential write score of 154.8MB/s. The Crystal Disk Mark 3.0 scores are as follows.      For the real-life transfer speeds, we transferred a 10GB single file and a 10GB assorted file from the source Corsair Neutron GTX SSD to the WD 4TB Black. After each transfer operation we restart the system in order to clear cache.  

    In sequential file transfer test, the WD drive was found to be slower than the Seagate SSHD. Even with the the assorted file transfer test we note that the Seagate 2TB SSHD is much faster than the WD 4TB Black drive in both the read and write tests. In the intra-drive transfer test however, the WD 4TB drive shows better performance. As far as real life performance goes, the WD 4TB Black drive isn’t as fast as we expected it to be.   Verdict and Price in India The WD 4TB Black drive comes at a price of Rs 21,000 thereby giving a cost per GB of Rs 5.63 which is slightly higher than Rs 5.15 offered by the Seagate 2TB SSHD. On the performance front, it is not the fastest internal drive despite being from the Black series. It’s still much better than its previous generation Caviar Black drives and that is good. If you really want a fast performing drive, the Seagate 2TB SSHD is the best option at the moment, if you don’t want to go down the SSD + HDD route just yet. The WD 4TB Black is a bit too expensive, especially since you can find the Seagate ST4000DM000 4TB drive for just Rs 12,000. Granted, it runs at a slower speed of 5900RPM, but if it’s just storage capacity you’re after, it’ll do just fine.