9.5

WD Black 4TB Hard Drive
(WD4001FAEX)

Welcome to Western Digital's highest performance and capacity SATA hard drive that boasts an astonishing 4TB (terabytes) of storage, 64MB Cache, Dual Stage Actuator Technology, Integrated Dual Processor and a SATA 6 GB/s interface. With all these technologies, the WD Black 4TB hard drive is definitely a speed demon and best of all, it can store quite a bit of information.

In terms of storage, 4TB is a considerable amount of storage and a 2TB hard drive (2,000GB) can store around 356,000 4.8MB (16MP Digital Camera) files. Increasing the storage space to 4TB, this doubles the amount of 4.8MB files to 712,000. Whether you're storing games, movies, music or work, the hard drive can keep it all.

Features

• Dual processor – Twice the processing power to maximize performance.

• Dual actuator technology – A head positioning system with two actuators that improves positional accuracy over the data track(s). The primary actuator provides coarse displacement using conventional electromagnetic actuator principles. The secondary actuator uses piezoelectric motion to fine tune the head positioning to a higher degree of accuracy.

• IntelliSeek – Calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise and vibration.

• StableTrac – The motor shaft is secured at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking during read and write operations.

• NoTouch ramp load technology – The recording head never touches the disk media ensuring significantly less wear to the recording head and media as well as better drive protection in transit.

Although SSD is still superior in performance, Western Digital have managed to break the performance barrier of this 4TB that is perfect for computer enthusiasts and gamers. With that said, SSD are still very small drives in terms of storage and with a high performance 4TB SATA drive available, this gives users a true workable option.

Also, at 4TB, this reduces the number of hard drives needed in your desktop PC and best of all, installation is a breeze. You simply connect two cables into the drive which includes the power cable and the SATA cable. Once connected, your motherboard should automatically detect the drive as will Windows. We tested the drive with Windows 7 which did need us to tweak the settings in order for us to get full access to the 4TB level.

Performance... this drive flies for a SATA hard drive.

Thanks to the 7200 RPM, the Dual Processor and 64MB cache, accessing files was almost instantaneous. However the best way to test hard drives is through gaming and there was a noticeable difference with games such as Far Cry, Battlefield 3 and World of Warcraft in terms of loading.

We also tested the drive via Adobe Photoshop CS5 and opened up some ridiculously large files which proved that Western Digital was onto something. Compared to our Seagate 2TB drive, the WD Black 4TB hard drive is definitely the faster component in this race.

Benchmarks

We also tested the drive with three hard drive benchmark tools that included ATTO, HD Tune Pro 500 and CrystalMark v3. Although not in the same calibre as a SSD, the WD Black 4TB is still very fast for a SATA drive and the results speak for themselves. In terms of read/write speed, accessing files is where the drive excels.

Final Thoughts?

With a recommended retail price of around $429AUD (December 2012), the Western Digital 4TB also boasts a five year limited warranty which will give the user some additional piece of mind, considering the amount of data that you can store. Although a little pricey, you are paying for a far superior and larger SATA drive with some exceptional performance.

Highly Recommended!