Final year's Thailand floods wreaked havoc on the storage industry, as the region accounts for about one-half of all difficult drive production. Western Digital was amidst the hardest striking, announcing last October that, like many others, it would suspend operations at affected locations. In addition to inflating prices, the disaster slowed the introduction of new products as suppliers and manufacturers struggled to get back on track.

It's been a long year of supply shortages and wacky premiums, but things are finally stabilizing and new designs are trickling out of bulldoze makers including Western Digital, which hasn't showed much since unveiling its first 3TB hard bulldoze two years agone. Making up for that dry spell, the visitor has recently introduced new ultra-fast RE enterprise drives besides as a Red series for NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices.

Even more recently, WD expanded its Black series with a 4TB model. Being the company's flagship desktop range, Blackness drives are meant to deliver a residue betwixt speed, capacity and price. Focusing on that latter bespeak for a moment, we should notation that although the WD Black 4TB has an suggested retail price of $339, near shops are currently charging between $350 and $400 for the bulldoze.

Even so, at $350, a Black 4TB bulldoze is slightly cheaper than a pair of WD Black 2TB drives and much more affordable than the previously released WD RE 4TB (enterprise oriented) drive, which currently retails for $480. Given that we've been spoiled by SSDs over the last few years, we don't look to be blown away past the new drive'southward blistering speed, but it should exist fun comparing its performance with other terabyte-plus hard drives if ample capacity is what you lot're seeking.

WD Blackness 4TB in Particular

The Black 4TB (model WD4001FAEX) is one of just a few 4TB hard drives available and meets the standard 3.5" course factor for difficult drives measuring 5.78" (147mm) long, four" (101.6mm) wide and 1.02" (25.4mm) thick, and it weighs 1.72lbs (0.78kg).

The Black 4TB has a 7200RPM spindle speed with an boilerplate admission time of 4.2ms, and Western Digital says it has a drive to drive throughput of 154MB/south, making it the fastest Black difficult drive yet.

Despite existence considerably more than affordable than the enterprise class RE 4TB (model WD4000FYYZ), the new Black 4TB is remarkably similar. The RE 4TB comes with a higher 1.2 million hour MTBF rating every bit well as extended factory testing to ensure reliability. The pricier version also features a brusk Fourth dimension-Limited Error Recovery (TLER), which is benign for most RAID setups but a potentially bad idea for single bulldoze configurations.

The technology is designed to preclude difficult drives from prematurely dropping out of RAID arrays and forcing rebuilds, or worse, RAID volume loss. All the same, information technology can cause performance issues when used in non-RAID configurations. If a hiccup happens on a single drive and no mistake recovery is possible from the nonexistent redundant data, the operating system or device controller has to wait for the drive to report back. This can have anywhere from a few to several seconds and volition cause a organisation to slow down or hang in the process, so it's obvious why Western Digital would remove TLER from the Black series.

Despite those differences, the two are however very like in design and specifications. The WD Black 4TB notwithstanding uses five 800GB platters rather than iv larger 1TB platters, which is a more ability hungry fix, only Western Digital says the five-platter design optimizes longevity. When reading or writing data, Western Digital claims a power consumption of 10.4 watts and this drops to 8.1 watts at idle and 1.2 watts in standby.

The Black 4TB yet features the dual-actuator technology, 64MB of cache, 6Gb/s SATA back up, and a Marvell dual-core controller. The 64MB enshroud is provided by a Winbond W9751G6JB-25 chip which meets the DDR2-800 spec using CL5-v-five timings.

Western Digital has too included its StableTrac and NoTouch technologies. The sometime sees that the motor shaft is secured at both ends to reduce vibration, which helps to stabilize the platters for more accurate tracking during read and write operations, while the latter ensures the recording heads never touch the deejay media, which allows for significantly less wear to the recording head and media besides every bit improve drive protection when mobile.

Likewise of notation, the Blackness 4TB is backed by a five-year limited warranty, which should make spending well over $300 on this bulldoze a piddling more than reassuring.