Recently Western Digital was able to show that they were well on their way towards recovering from the disastrous flooding in Thailand. Their lineup was reinvigorated by the introduction of an ultra fast VelociRaptor and the new RE series which pushed capacities to the astounding 4TB mark.

; - Massive capacity; - Good performance; - 5 Year warranty; - Easily the quietest Black ever released

; - Not as fast as the 4TB RE model; - While price per GB is reasonable $340 is still a lot for a hard drive; - Noise reduction does come at the price of performance potential

The 4TB WD Black is Western Digital's top-capacity and top-performing 7,200 RPM client system hard drive. The standard 3.5" form factor is designed to provide bulk storage for desktop use, while still offering top class performance.

Top capacity point for client workstation use; Five year warranty

Trails Hitachi Deskstar 7k4000 in almost every workload; High max latency issues in all mixed workloads

I purchased this drive and put it in a USB 3.0 external enclosure. The speeds are blazing fast and very quite. I don't have exact numbers of transfer rates, but well satisfied. If you are going to do the same and use in external enclosure, make sure that external enclosure can handle 3 or 4 TB...

In the review of the WD RE 4 TB we wrote that it contained four 1TB platters, but it turns out that's not the case. With the information we now have it appears that both that WD RE 4TB and this Caviar Black 4 TB use five 800 GB platters.

Bigger drives are better value, more space for your money. Performance is good, it does not need to be a fast dive from bulk storage my OS is on a SSD. 4T is a big chunk of storage, easy to install and set up on W7 b4bit system. I would advise you to use GTP option before you format your dive.

I purchased this drive and put it in a USB 3.0 external enclosure. The speeds are blazing fast and very quite. I don't have exact numbers of transfer rates, but well satisfied. If you are going to do the same and use in external enclosure, make sure that external enclosure can handle 3 or 4 TB...

Western Digital have been at the forefront of storage solutions for a solid number of years, and it's their commitment to research and development that has enabled them to keep this position.

I get these drives for their reliability. 5 year warranty says it all really.

I Bought these drives to replace my current 2TB WD Caviar Black Drives (3 total)on my desktop. I have used them for 3 years with no trouble and expected to get the same results for these larger drives.

7200rpm, 4TB, what else is there to say. since IBM/HGST/whoever they just got sold too isn't IBM anymore, and given the SOLID state (no pun intended) of the (*)raptors and external RAID storage I've just stopped looking outside of WD. This is the new IBM; IMO.