Western Digital makes a massive drive. And
'yes', it comes in black
The 'Black' versions of Western Digital
drives are made to provide an extra bit of performance above what a typical hard
drive mechanism would offer. This drive is no different in that respect, being
one of the quickest physical drives I've ever tested.
Western
Digital Black 4TB
When I thumbed through the physical
specifications, it was quite clearly built to perform at a level that hard
drives are not normally accustomed.
The design incorporates no less than five
800GB platters into the standard 3.5" form, with ten heads, dual actuators
and 64MB of cache to keep things well oiled. The only downside to this
configuration is the drive consumes more power, about 10.4 watts in operation,
more than a typical 3.5" desktop hard disk - but, having that many
platters does have the extra benefit of reduced wear and tear.
To effectively manage the data flowing
through the system, Western Digital has also been astute enough to fashion it
with a Marvell dual core controller, which is probably a first for a mainstream
hard drive. As such, almost everything about this drive shouts 'state of the art'
in magnetic storage technology. In fact, it was so new and shiny we couldn't
wait to get it cabled up to the test rig, and see if all these enhancements
delivered on their promise - not something we'd usually say about a
conventional hard drive.
The
design incorporates no less than five 800GB platters into the standard
3.5" form, with ten heads, dual actuators and 64MB of cache to keep things
well oiled
After attaching the drive to my test rig
and formatting it to the full 3726 gigabytes, (what 4TB translates into in
reality) benchmarks revealed that this drive could read and write consistently
at more than 150MB/s. Which isn't SSD quick, but it is a long way from being
classified as 'slow'. I've seen a couple of drives marginally faster than this:
Western Digital's Velociraptor, and a 3TB Seagate Barracuda, but the
performance here is much better than most 2TB drives I've seen, and roundly
embarrasses the majority of commonly used mechanisms.
There are two catches, the first of which
is that older systems often can't handle mechanisms of greater than 2.2TB,
which was an issue with 3TB drives when they first appeared. Windows Vista and
7 are fine, but you'll need to use a special driver on XP if you wish to see
this as a single 4TB volume.
The other, more challenging, issue is the
cost. All new big capacity drives come at a premium, but perhaps the price here
is on the high side even when you consider that. A 3TB drive is about £100, and
a 2TB can be had for $116.25 or less. In both circumstances you could have 6TB
total storage for less than this cost. However, if you've got a NAS box that
takes two drives, this is the only way you'll get 8GB of capacity or 4GB of
mirrored storage. The counter argument is that multiple 2TB drives working as
part of a bigger RAID solution would be even faster in most circumstances. And,
the thought of losing 4TB of data in a drive failure is still a daunting one.
There
are two catches, the first of which is that older systems often can't handle
mechanisms of greater than 2.2TB, which was an issue with 3TB drives when they
first appeared
This drive will get cheaper inevitably, if
you're prepared to wait for a 5TB drive to appear.
Till then this is a very sizable chunk of
storage with exceptionally good performance, if you're prepared to part with
the not insignificant amount of money that Western Digital is asking.
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Details
·
Price: $359
·
Manufacturer: Western Digital
·
Website: www.wdc.com
·
Required Spec: SATA port, preferably SA TA III 6Gbps
·
Product Code: WD4001FAEX
Ratings
·
Quality: 8/10
·
Value: 6/10
· Overall: 8/10
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