Western Digital's 4 TB WD4001FAEX Review: Back In Black

[Guest]

Western Digital has a new 4 TB flagship. Its WD4001FAEX is part of the company’s Black family of performance-oriented drives. Spinning at 7,200 RPM, it might seem at home in a high-end desktop, but our numbers suggest it might fare better in a server.

Western Digital's 4 TB WD4001FAEX Review: Back In Black : Read more

 

[joytech22]

So, who should buy Western Digital's WD4001FAEX? The company says its drive is meant for PC enthusiasts and professionals. But we can’t quite agree because Seagate's Barracuda is, quite simply, faster.

For enthusiasts, all we really want is space and lots of it. We fill it up fast, but we don't do anything super-intensive requiring a constant of 80+Mb/s over long durations.

For enthusiasts that do a lot of video editing using lots of tracks, sure it's a bit of a limitation but so is any one drive solution.

As for professionals, it just depends what they need it for.
A high-end workstation needing plenty of storage and speed just needs a RAID config containing a few of these babies. Or super-expensive high capacity SSD's...


All in all, I'm just saying it depends on your situation but generally you find people are happy with big drives regardless of speed (since all drives perform admirably nowdays anyway).

 

[cumi2k4]

what? 5 years warranty? does this include all other wd black drives?

 

[mayankleoboy1]

One thing i have never found a answer to : Is it worth defragmenting HDD's on modern systems, with Win7 and NTFS ?
I do defragment my HDD, but subjectively i find no difference. And i have yet to find objective data.

 

[alidan]

[citation][nom]mayankleoboy1[/nom]One thing i have never found a answer to : Is it worth defragmenting HDD's on modern systems, with Win7 and NTFS ?I do defragment my HDD, but subjectively i find no difference. And i have yet to find objective data.[/citation]

it really depends.
if you dont have a boot specific drive, than defragmenting is kind of important.
if you do... than it doesn't tank system performance to not defrag.
really what kills a hdd performance is being a a boot drive and storage, as it can get so slammed with access that it drags the over all performance to sub mb levels.

what hurts a hdd on storage when its not a boot, is filling the damn thing up to the last mb.

generally, if you have a hdd and have enough space to defrag it without the program complaining (15-25% of the space remaining) you dont need to defrag. it helps, but you wont see the gains that you otherwise may see if you didnt have the space to defrag.

 

[avjguy2362]

Before SSD's I used to use a 75 GB raptor and used O&O's defrag COMPLETE method on the OS and it made a substantial difference. O&O has multiple types of defrag: a quick version, a standard version and a "Complete" version that takes a long time because it moves the data to the other end of the drive and then puts all the files back in the order that they would most likely be read. It's unnecessary for data drives, but for the OS it made a big difference.

 

[Guest]

Chocolate? Since this about 4TB of storage, at first i thought i was looking at picture of a work out video for the hard drive junky, 10 condoms, WD happy mascot, and a rubber keychain all part of a harmless joke by WD.

 

[_Pez_]

I prefer storage over extreme speed of SSD.
Nice Review I liked more the hitachi perfomance, also those are better than the WDs' HDD I think WD is getting left behind about perfomance numbers, now I see in this review that the strong ones are Seagate and Hitachi.
My main PC has 14TB of storage; 4 seagate 3tb 2&2 in RAID 0, 2 seagate 1TB RAID 0 for OS, all of those are the newely Seagate models of 1TB per platter.
I do not see the need to spent on SSDs while there's the chance to get lots of storage and decent speeds, except for 4Kb transfers.

 

[Luay]

Seagate Barracuda 3TB is on three (1TBx3) platters so why not WD?
Another issue I dislike about the WD Caviar blacks is the noise they make. How much does this update improve on this issue?

 

[abbadon_34]

Not sure why WD is being secretive about the number of platters, it's always been standard info and I can't see a reason not to. It's nice to see 5 years warranties back, and not confined to enterprise or Raptor series. While nothing to exciting, it's nice to see a good solid hardware review.

 

[hytecgowthaman]

80mb per sec Ok how many hours to fill the hdd.
5Year warranty is ok but we need data recovery warranty because (4tb) hdd fails no way to get the files.
so always use another 4tb for back up use.
another thing is how many hours take to recovery the files.

 

[hytecgowthaman]

For 4tb hdds atleast 500mb per sec is needed for customers .

 

[jaideep1337]

I understand WD trying to make large capacity HDDs but the Read/Write Speeds are just too slow. I wouldn't go above 2tb for a single drive. Either buy multiple HDD and run them separately or make a decent RAID setup

 

[xkm1948]

WD's quality control is going down the drain. I bought one 1.5TB Black drive and it only last 14 months before becoming unable to access. WD sent me a 2TB Black re-certified drive for RMA. Drive shows huge Raw Read Error Rate right out of the box. Within 2 weeks I get several current pending sectors and offline uncorrectable sectors.

 

[Onus]

The WD Black drives I've bought lately are a LOT quieter than the one I bought three years ago. That's the oldest one I have, but other than a single DOA drive last Spring, none have failed or had any problems. With other companies reducing their warranties, that WD hasn't is a big deal to me. This weekend I'll be setting up a third RAID1 pair of them.
I agree with joytech22 about all [7200rpm] drives having adequate performance. My boot drives are SSDs, but for data, the speed differences in everyday use from one magnetic to another aren't noticeable.

 

[Nakecat]

Last I checked, WD Black is for regular desktop user and not recommended for sever use due to the lack of TLER function. My company ran into this problem 2 years ago when WD first removed the TLER and causing our RAID failed every week or 2. Then WD recommended us to use RE only drive in RAID setup.
If you are not using single drive for your server, stay away from the Black edition. go for RE or RED from NAS.

 

[Guest]

I'm slightly confused by the reviewers acertion that somehow a single 4Tb drive would be more appropriate in a server. I work as a storage analyst with products from NetApp, HP, EMC, etc, and a single 4Tb disk housing a 4Tb volume wouldn't see the light of day in any of the FTSE/DOW/NASDAQ 100 enterprises that I consult for. Too many eggs in too big a basket meaning limited scope for resilience. A single 4Tb disk fails and thats a lot of data that disappears in one foul swoop, and in order to get the reslience from an appropriate sized RAID setup would mean the resultant capacity would be more than most enterprise applications warrant even in these days. A large capacity array also implies a high performance requirement and SATA drives at this end of the market just do not deliver. There is more chance of me putting a nest of vipers down my pants than speccing any enterprise hardware to include this device, so please TH it's best not to speculate on such an application for such a device.

It's a consumer product, plain and simple.

 

[TheBigTroll]

id rather pick up a seagate 3tb for 120 dollars. didnt have luck with WD

 

[warmon6]

[citation][nom]hytecgowthaman[/nom]80mb per sec Ok how many hours to fill the hdd. 5Year warranty is ok but we need data recovery warranty because (4tb) hdd fails no way to get the files.so always use another 4tb for back up use.another thing is how many hours take to recovery the files.[/citation]

... Did you think before posting? Some parts make no sense and other parts.... well just me to shake my head....

1. If your worried about data recovery options (certainly on a HDD of this size), I would say you have bigger problems with your backup/recovery solution(s).


[citation][nom]hytecgowthaman[/nom]For 4tb hdds atleast 500mb per sec is needed for customers .[/citation]

2. If your worried about the speed of a single HDD. Your looking at the wrong thing.

3. 500MB/s is an unreal goal for any HDD for the near future. even the 15K rpm drives (last i check) haven't passed the 300MB/s mark.


Not everyone would need insane speeds with High capacity drives. If your setting up a HTPC with Live TV for example, you dont need a lot of speed for recording and viewing but with each show/movie going anywhere from 1GB to 10+ GB (largest recoding i've had was 25GB when I recorded the opening of the summer Olympics), You'll need a lot of space.

Not saying that someone building or adding storage to an HTPC will get this particular drive but since you said

4tb hdds atleast 500 mb per sec

to me means any 4tb drives needs insane speed.

 

[warmon6]

[citation][nom]BigMack70[/nom]Warranty is a huge factor on hard drive purchases for me (probably the biggest factor)... I just flat out won't buy a hard drive unless it has a 5 year warranty attached to it, which is why I love the WD Black series.I have NEVER had an HDD last for 5 years if it didn't have a 5 year warranty... every drive I've ever purchased that had a 1/2/3 year warranty died shortly after the warranty expired.[/citation]

Guess I'm just lucky as the drives I've got drives that go from 1 years to 5 years and all of them were either DOA or lasted well beyond the warranty..Longest one my family has is about 10 year old (maybe 11, im losing track now :lol 80GB seagate HDD and it's still active and working to this day. Think it only had 2/3 year warranty.

 

[mayankleoboy1]

WD, Seagate or Samsung. All are same. None have really reliable drives.
Backup, Backup and more Backup.

 

[TeraMedia]

I can't figure out the real market for this drive. It's not online high-volume; if your data needs to be online, then it probably needs to have reasonably high availability. That implies RAID, which then implies something like the 2 or 4 TB RAID Edition (RE yellow-label) drives, or the Seagate Barracuda XT. Blacks aren't well-suited for RAID, lacking TLER. It's not online performance; again, three or four 2TB drives in RAID 5 will give better streaming performance, and may also give better IOPS performance. It's not near-line storage either; for consumer-grade installations I would use the Reds, which seem to offer decent near-line performance with outstanding power management, and offer better RAID compatibility to-boot. For commercial-grade installations, again the REs, XT, or SAS drives just make more sense.

I fear that this may be a product without a purpose. For the consumer market, the largest consumer of storage space - video - is increasingly becoming streamed data rather than locally-stored data. And I cannot imagine consuming 4 TB of home video. TV shows? Yes, but at that point I'd shift to a home server RAID array anyway.

 

[gwolfman]

Short-stroke this to 2TB and I'd be curious as to how it fairs in the benchies.

 

[mapesdhs]

jotech22 writes:
> As for professionals, it just depends what they need it for.
> A high-end workstation needing plenty of storage and speed just needs a RAID
> config containing a few of these babies.

Professionals use Enterprise SATA, SAS or FibreChannel, not consumer drives which are far more
likely to fail. If a 'professional' is using consumer storage products, then their budget sucks.

Ian.

 

[edlivian]

Yeah, I agree with mapesdhs, I cannot imagine any corporation really relying on these consumer hard drives. Despite the five year warranty most drives fail over time. As I small business owner which also handles IT in the office, I gave up on troubleshooting on constant hard drive failures, and I switched everybody's PC/laptops to SSD from Crucial/Samsung/Intel.

And all the fileservers are all running raid 5 Seagate ES or WD RE/RE4, and my storage management duties have just been simplified.

My home server is running WD Red drives, so far soo good, but i am cautious about them.