Conclusion

It's been a while since we last tested a Western Digital Black drive, and we are glad to see that it still lives up to its reputation for delivering top-notch performance for the desktop. In a market that's frankly obsessed with lowering storage costs (cost per GB), it's nice to see cost take a back seat to performance. That is what the WD Black family of drives is all about - performance.

In our real world tests, the 4 TB Western Digital Black aced all of them, beating even the enterprise-grade Western Digital Re. Of course, the Western Digital Re drive is optimized for a different application, and our synthetic tests showed us just how different these two drives are, even though they are quite similar physically - with the same spindle speed and cache size.

The 4 TB Western Digital Re (WD4000FYYZ) was strongly optimized for random accesses, particularly random writes. The WD Re was 2.5X faster than the 4 TB Western Digital Black at small random writes, and 67% faster at large random writes.

The 4 TB Western Digital Black (WD4003FZEX), on other hand, was optimized for sequential accesses. It edged out the Western Digital Re in all aspects but one - small, sequential writes.

When we further investigated the performance of both drives with multiple, simultaneous accesses, we can see that the WD Black drive was almost identical in performance to the WD Re drive in certain aspects - small reads (both random and sequential) and large sequential reads and writes, but the WD Re was far superior in all other aspects.

Needless to say, this is hardly a fair comparison because the WD Re is a far more expensive, enterprise-grade hard disk drive. That's why we were impressed by the fact that the WD Black held out on its own in many of these tests. It would be even more unfair if we were to compare the 4 TB WD Black to the 4 TB WD Red or the 3 TB WD Green, both of which are slower-spinning drives. If you want to see them compared though, you can do so in our Hard Disk Drive Performance Comparison Guide.

As we pointed out in our introduction, the SSDs that are being used in desktops today do not have the capacity to store the tremendous amount of media we all use and store today. So a hard disk drive is still necessary because it provides a much larger storage capacity and just as importantly, affordably so. For home users who use the hard disk drive to store their pictures and movies, cheap 5400 RPM hard disk drive will serve them well enough. However, for users who actually need to edit or process those media files, the performance of these cheaper but slower drives just won't cut it.

That's where the WD Black drives come in. The 4 TB model (WD4003FZEX), in particular, offers as much storage capacity as the cheaper drives but with much better performance. Once you have tried actually doing work on files that are stored on the WD Black drive, you will never go back to slower-spinning hard disk drives.

The 4 TB Western Digital Black is also good for those who are prefer a single drive but want a large storage capacity to boot. Its very high throughput will ensure quick boot times. To further improve its random access characteristics, you can always short stroke the drive, allowing you to achieve VelociRaptor-level seek times.

For the lowest current prices on Western Digital Black hard disk drives, click here!

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