Western Digital WD Black 4TB SATA 6Gb/s, 3.5" High Performance Internal Hard Drive with 7200 RPM & 256 MB Cache

I recently lost a PC, and am going through a technology upgrade cycle, and wanting to have data redundancy and convenient clones of hard drives to test under various scenarios (different PC's, docks, cloning hardware and software, OS's, etc.)So, I recently bought four of these (One from Amazon, and three from another PC vendor). All four worked as expected right out of the box, taking nearly a 1 TB of Windows 7 OS and user data from other PC's via various drive cloning processes, and then showing up as expected and letting me acess and update the data just fine.The drives seem to run reasonably cool, and are fairly quiet (considering I'm running them in external open SATA docks for now), and the speed is fine. Just what I'd expect from a modern WD drive.I don't take chances with my data, so am happy to pay the premium for the WD black technology and reputation vs., say the WD blue. I can't report on reliability/durability yet, since I've had these drives less than a week.If I have problems worth noting, I'll plan to post updates.In my experience (from memory), over the past 20+ years, I've had a LOT of experience with roughly 30 WD drives. All consumer drives, size ranging from about a GB to 4 TB.I've had only two problems. One was completely my fault. Back in the day when they sealed the drives with some kind of rubber gasket, I tore a small section of that removing a drive from a desktop case the first time. (Not a HW guy -- didn't know what I was doing). That drive crashed in a few days -- which again was COMPLETELY my fault as air (with hair, dust, etc) got in there for awhile.I had another drive start making noises and refusing to accept a full hard drive clone via Partition Magic version 8.X -- probably in the early 2000's. Again, not wanting to fool around with my data, I quit using that drive. The main reason I've stuck with WD is the drives seem to be very solid and perform consistently. I've use lots of both bare OEM and full retail kit WD drives, depending on prices/convenience.

I purchased this drive to replace a failing one on a relative's Windows-based system. I also used the Acronis True Image WD Edition Software, downloaded from the manufacturer's site to clone the old drive.I was half-way through the installation when I thought, "What if I were just a general consumer and not a computer geek?" In other words, what if my relative had ordered this drive and tried to replace the old one without calling me? It probably would not have gone well, as it arrives as just a drive in a box, with no documentation or hints of what to do. The documentation on the manufacturer's Web site is fair, but maybe not enough for an average person off the street. With that in mind ...The installation went very cleanly. I had a spare SATA cable handy, which I needed during the replacement, and a SATA power Y splitter, which I did not need in this case. Those items do not come with the drive: You will have to purchase those separately if you need them. You may also need to buy 4 drive screws, but I personally did not need them for this installation either. I was going to use different software to clone the failing drive, but decided to use the utility provided by the manufacturer on their Web site. I Read The Friendly Manual and it worked very efficiently. After cloning, I removed the old drive and rebooted with only the new one. Everything was fine. I did not run any extensive diagnostics, but this new drive is relatively fast and quiet with no obvious defects so far.That was just a day ago, so I will leave my rating at 5 stars for now. Other reviewers have had quality and return problems after a few months and have submitted lower ratings. Hopefully, years will go by and I won't hear about any problems. The manufacturer makes kits providing additional documentation, cables and such if you need them -- but for me this purchase was a good option.

I needed a bigger HDD for the huge influx of 4K footage I'm working with. Got it in a cardboard box and a non-static/spill-proof metallic sleeve. Two plastic shock absorbers were located at the top and bottom of the drive.Date of manufacture was dated 20 FEB 2022. Looks like they're pushing in the new stuff now.Installation was easy, just crack open the PC case and slip it into the rack. I knew about the noisy reputation that WD Black Drive's had, so I ordered a couple of noise-isolating screws and rubber washer to help mitigate the impending cacophony. After slamming everything together, I shoved it all into the PC.Storage size and transfer rate is top-notch, I can both watch and edit 4K movies with no trouble at all. The only problem (which is honestly a non-issue for me, but maybe not for you) is the noise it makes. Every so often, maybe every 5-10 seconds the disk head moves and you can hear a slight "thunk". You get used to it after a while, and this IS a performance drive, so noise like that is to be expected. Might be a bit jarring to people who weren't around when your computer sounding like an old muscle car starting up was standard.When going through heavy loads, the HDD spins to a high speed, but thanks to those noise-isolating screws and washers, I barely hear it. And since I'm only using this drive for editing, when I'm not editing Windows automatically turns off the drive so the "thunking" isn't around unless the drive is on and in use. No "scratching" or similar noises have been heard from the drive yet, and I've been using it heavily since Day-1. Only Whirling of the disks and the every present "thunk".This will give you good storage and speed with the only trade-off being noise. Keep that in mind as you eye that "Add To Cart" button.