Western Digital WD Black 4TB (WD4003FZEX) Review

Western Digital's new "Black" 4TB (WD4003FZEX) ($185.00 at Amazon) drive is the latest high-capacity internal spinning disc from the long-time drive manufacturer. While solid-state drives (SSDs) may have captured much of the high-performance segment, the WD Black 4TB is a great solution for buyers who need maximum capacity and a reasonably high-end drive, or anyone looking for a large secondary drive that doesn't want to wait on a 5,400rpm product.

At 7,200rpm, Western Digital's Black hard drive line sits midway between the low-power, efficiency-oriented Western Digital Green drives, at 5,400rpm, and the high-end VelociRaptor series at 10,000rpm WD Black products use drive shafts secured at both ends to minimize vibration, have two onboard processors to handle the data load, and carry five-year warranties.

We compared the WD Black 4TB against two other Western Digital drives from different time periods and price points. First, there's a 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black HDD (WD has since dropped the word "Caviar" from its product branding) from 2008. This was one of the first Caviar Black drives—it only supports SATA 3G, has a 32MB cache compared to 64MB on the Black 4TB, and lacks the sophisticated cache mechanism tools that characterize the WD Black 4TB and the other drive in our comparison—the Western Digital VelociRaptor.

The VelociRaptor is the highest-end consumer HDD that Western Digital currently sells. It spins at 10,000rpm compared with 7,200rpm for the other models, supports SATA 6G, and carries the lowest error rate of any WD consumer product, with an estimated 1E10x16 error rate as opposed to the 1E10x14 rate of the WD Black 4TB. Testing the new Black against the older 1TB Caviar Black drive and the high-end VelociRaptor will give us an idea of how much hard drive performance has improved over the past five years.

Subjective Performance
When we review products, we typically confine commentary to benchmark data. Subjective experience is just that, after all, and different people weight things differently. We're going to bend that rule in this case because the difference between using the Caviar Black 1TB and the Black 4TB or VelociRaptor in ordinary desktop tasks was significant enough to be worth mentioning. Specifically, the 1TB Caviar Black was noticeably slower, even when it came to hitting the Start button, opening "My Computer," or launching a program.

We bring this up here because the performance lag was both higher than expected, even for a conventional HDD, and is not directly reflected in the tests themselves, which show a fairly modest performance improvement in most areas. A SMART scan and full error check of the Caviar Black 1TB revealed no errors and the drive was formatted and partitioned fresh for these tests.

Performance
We tested all three Western Digital drives using our trusty Asus P877V-Deluxe motherboard with 8GB of DDR3-1600 and an Intel Core i7-3770K CPU. The P877-V Deluxe offers multiple SATA controllers from Intel and Marvell; all of the drives were connected to Intel's 6G SATA port. We used the popular AS-SSD benchmark to test the hard drives' sequential read/write speeds and to measure file copy performance. Sequential read/write tests measure a hard drive's capabilities when reading or writing a large block of contiguous data. A single large movie or ISO image will test a drive's sequential performance (assuming that the target drive isn't badly fragmented).

In AS-SSD, the Western Digital Black 4TB hit 123MBps sequential read and 141MBps sequential write. That's 23% and 51% faster than the Caviar Black 1TB, at 100MBps and 93MBps, respectively. The VelociRaptor was faster on both counts, at 201MBps read, and 187MBps write. The read speed difference is particularly interesting given that the VelociRaptor's rotational velocity is only 38% faster than the Black 4TB's 7,200rpm.

AS-SSD's also includes a real-world file copy test with three presets—ISO files, program files, and game files. Each type of file is a different size and includes a different amount of compressible data. We reboot in between benchmark runs of this test and throw out the outliers to prevent data caching in Windows or on-drive from polluting the results. Here, the 4TB Black drive made hash of the five-year-old Caviar Black 1TB—its ISO copy speed was 105MBps, program files were 46MBps, and game files hit 79MBps. That's compared to 52MBps, 32MBps, and 46MBps in each category for the 2008-era HDD. The VelociRaptor was faster yet, at 146MBps, 59MBps, and 93MBps, but the 4TB Black was much closer to its high-performance cousin than the old 7,200rpm hard drive.

Next, we have PCMark 7 and the newer PCMark 8. PCMark 7's storage benchmark test uses real storage workloads created by recording traces of hard drive activity when playing games, loading music or video, or copying files. These traces are used to measure the performance of storage products in comprehensive real-world scenarios. Here, the Caviar Black 1TB scored a 2,056 points, the Western Digital Black 4TB scored a 2,282, and the Western Digital VelociRaptor hit 2,691. In this particular case, the WD Black 4TB drive is roughly 11% faster than the Caviar Black 1TB, while the VelociRaptor remains 18% faster than the 4TB Black.

Finally, PCMark 8's dedicated storage test is the other new addition for this review. (Scores in PCMark 7 & PCMark 8 are not equivalents and cannot be compared against each other). This new benchmark has a storage-specific workload that tests both consumer and workstation applications with an emphasis on write performance for the Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premiere tests. The rankings broke down similarly to PCMark 7, with the VelociRaptor coming in at 3276, the Black 4TB at 2827, and the Caviar Black 1TB at 2580. Scores between PCMark 7 and PCMark 8 cannot be compared against each other, but as in PCM7, the relative spread was a 10% advantage for the 4TB Black against the five year-old 1TB Caviar Black and the VelociRaptor at 16% faster than the 4TB drive.

A 10% performance difference between the 1TB and 4TB drives may not seem like much, but that's actually a much wider gap than we typically see in PCMark 7 & 8 when testing SSDs. The real-world file copy tests point to much larger differences; the Black 4TB drive was 43% to 100% faster than the Caviar Black 1TB in those benchmark tests.

While the 1TB VelociRaptor drive is faster than the WD Black 4TB, there's a cost-per-gigabyte value to be considered. Right now, the Black 4TB is selling for around $293, or roughly seven cents per gig. The VelociRaptor, in contrast, is still much higher, at 21 cents per GB ($271 list price).

At 7 cents per GB, the Western Digital 4TB Black is an excellent value. It's a bit quieter than the Caviar Black 1TB, its performance is much stronger than the older drive, and it's much cheaper than buying an equivalent amount of storage in SSDs. If you need high-capacity storage that comes with reasonable performance, this is a drive to consider.

Western Digital WD Black 4TB (WD4003FZEX)

4.0

Editors' Choice

See It

$185.00 at Amazon

MSRP $295.00

Pros

• Whopping 4TB of space.
• Low price per GB.

Cons

• Falling SSD prices continue to cut into hard drive's appeal.

The Bottom Line

High-end performance (for a hard drive) and a low cost per GB make the WD Black 4TB internal hard drive a winner.