WD Black 4TB FZEX
EDITOR’S CHOICE
AWARD
RRP: $258.99 | Website: www.wdc.com
I
t’s been a while since I tested a
magnetic hard drive. In fact it’s
been years since I even gave a
second thought to such storage. In
my mind and I suppose for many
others as well, these drives have
been relegated to pure mass
storage where their performance
is of little to no concern. The SSDs
is where the performance is and
there’s no turning back of course.
Recently though I found myself
wanting to consolidate all of my
media onto a single drive as it was
stored all over the place on different
drives of varying capacities.
Moreover since one of the drives
that stored my media also happened
to have my games on it, I took it upon
myself to look for a solution that
could give me all this functionality
and that obviously meant looking at
a drive such as this.
As I’ve always been fascinated or
at least far more interested in WD’s
Black series drives than any others,
it stands that this is where I would
look first. Previously I had used the
older 1TB FAEX model and found it
to be every bit as good as I had read
it was elsewhere at the time. Suffice
to say this drive is still in use in an
old external drive enclosure. Not
40 The OverClocker Issue 28 | 2014
for its performance of course but it
does speak about its reliability as
it’s been years since I bought that
drive.
The 4TB WD Black here is actually
the 2nd generation 4TB drive that
has come from WD. The previous
FAEX model has been replaced
with this one which offers better
performance and reliability.
WD states that the additional
performance comes from a series of
technologies including an upgraded
dual-core processor and better
data access algorithms. Be that
as it may, when I tested the drive
and compared it to the previous
model I did find that there have
been indeed some improvements
across the board in performance.
Hard to imagine that a processor
can increase drive performance
this dramatically but it turns out it
has as I recorded sustained data
read and write performance of 191
and 190Mb/s respectively. These
are absolutely fantastic numbers
for magnetic storage because they
actually make the FZEX drive just
as fast as the WD Velociraptor
600GB. This is an older model but
consider just how fast that drive was
in relation to others in its heyday
and how much it cost. Now however,
I can get similar performance for
significantly less and about six times
the formatted capacity. If that isn’t a
good deal I’m not sure what is.
I ran the usual test suit and
recorded 4K read and write
performance, IOPS results and
the like. As expected the Velociraptor
is faster in some of these
tests, if only because of the high
10K rpm platter speed. I must say
though, if you’re looking for ultimate
performance and given the price
of the 1TB Velociraptor you may
as well look at SSDs. For gaming
and the like this drive is more than
fast enough. In fact, moving some
games off the SSD to this drive
showed no obvious increases in
load time for instance. There was
no drive thrashing and certainly
no effect on system speed even
with the swap file located on this
drive. With all that said, it’s pretty
hard to not be impressed by the WD
4TB Black FZEX. Not only is it the
fastest magnetic mass storage I’ve
tested but it certainly is the most
cost effective when it comes to bang
for your buck. This one is highly
recommended.
[ The Overclocker ]