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 recently added a new model to its Black family of performance-oriented hard drives. The new disk, technically referred to as WD4001FAEX, sports 4 TB of space. It spins at 7,200 RPM, employs a 6 Gb/s SATA interface, and includes 64 MB of cache.
Although the company won't divulge how many platters this behemoth uses to hit its capacity ceiling, our benchmark/power data suggests the magic number is five. You can’t tell by simply looking at it; the drive is 26.1 mm-thick, just like many other 3 and 4 TB repositories.
As a general rule, the more capacity a hard drive hosts, the longer it takes to benchmark. Western Digital's WD4001FAEX is certainly no exception. It took us 19 hours of testing to get a complete picture of its performance. Fortunately, the company kept this in mind when it sent out samples, providing us with some much-needed sugar. It's too bad that you don't get chocolate as part of the disk's standard bundle. When you spend $330, a bare 4 TB hard drive is all you get.
Technical Specifications
| Manufacturer | Western Digital |
|---|---|
| Family | Black |
| Model Number | WD4001FAEX |
| Form Factor | 3.5" |
| Capacity | 4 TB |
| RPM | 7,200 |
| Other Capacities | 500 GB, 1 TB, 2 TB |
| Platters | Unknown |
| Cache | 64 MB |
| Interface | SATA 6Gb/s |
| Operating Temperature | 0-55° C |
| Power Consumption at Idle (Manufacturer's Specifications) | 8.1 W |
| Power Consumption at Idle (Measured) | 7.9 W |
| Maximum Allowable Shock Level (2 ms, read) | 65 G |
Benchmark System
| Benchmark System Hardware | |
|---|---|
| CPU | Intel Core i5-2500K (Sandy Bridge), Stepping D2, 32 nm, 4C/4T, 3.3 GHz Base Clock Rate, 3.7 GHz Maximum Turbo Boost, 4 x 256 KB L2 Cache, 6 MB Shared L3 Cache, HD Graphics 3000, 95 W TDP |
| Motherboard | Gigabyte Z68X-UD3H-B3, Revision: 0.2, Chipset: Intel Z68 Express, BIOS: F3 |
| RAM | 2 x 2 GB DDR3-1333, Corsair TR3X6G1600C8D |
| System SSD | Intel X25-M G1, 80 GB, Firmware 0701, SATA 3Gb/s |
| Benchmarked Hard Drive | Western Digital Black WD4001FAEX, 4 TB, 64 MB Cache, SATA 6Gb/s, 7,200 RPM |
| Controller | Intel PCH Z68 SATA 6 Gb/s |
| Power Supply | Seasonic X-760 760 W, SS-760KM Active PFC F3 |
| Benchmarks | |
| Benchmark Software | CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 x64 h2benchw 3.16 PCMark 7 1.0.4 |
| I/O Benchmark Software | IOMeter 2006.07.27 Webserver Benchmark Database Benchmark Fileserver Benchmark Workstation Benchmark Streaming Reads Streaming Writes 4K Random Reads 4K Random Writes |
| System Software and Drivers | |
| Software and Drivers | Details |
| Operating System | Windows 7 x64 Ultimate SP1 |
| Intel INF | 9.2.0.1030 |
| Intel Rapid Storage Technology | 10.5.0.1026 |
- Western Digital's Performance-Oriented 4 TB Hard Drive
- Benchmark Results: Data Throughput And Interface Bandwidth
- Benchmark Results: 4 KB Random Reads/Writes And Streaming Reads/Writes
- Benchmark Results: Seek Times And I/O Performance
- Benchmark Results: PCMark Application Performance
- Temperatures And Power Consumption
- Western Digital's WD4001FAEX: Probably Not For Home Use




I do defragment my HDD, but subjectively i find no difference. And i have yet to find objective data.
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).
I do defragment my HDD, but subjectively i find no difference. And i have yet to find objective data.
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.
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.
Another issue I dislike about the WD Caviar blacks is the noise they make. How much does this update improve on this issue?
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.
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.
If you are not using single drive for your server, stay away from the Black edition. go for RE or RED from NAS.
It's a consumer product, plain and simple.
... 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).
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
to me means any 4tb drives needs insane speed.
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
Backup, Backup and more Backup.