Last year's Thailand floods wreaked havoc on the computer storage industry, as the region accounts for about uncomplete of all disk drive yield. Western Digital was among the hardest hit, announcing shoemaker's last October that, like many others, information technology would suspend operations at affected locations. Additionally 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 retentive year of cater shortages and wacky premiums, but things are finally stabilizing and new designs are trickling out of labor makers including Southwestern Extremity, which hasn't showed much since unveiling its low 3TB hard drive two years ago. Making finished for that solid spell, the company has recently introduced new ultra-fast RE enterprise drives as well Eastern Samoa a Red series for NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices.

Even more recently, WD swollen its Black series with a 4TB model. Being the company's flagship desktop range, Black drives are meant to fork out a balance 'tween swiftness, content and price. Focusing on that last mentioned point for a moment, we should note that although the WD Black 4TB has an recommended retail price of $339, nearly shops are currently charging between $350 and $400 for the drive.

Plane soh, at $350, a Black 4TB drive is slenderly cheaper than a pair of WD Black 2TB drives and much much affordable than the previously released WD Re 4TB (go-ahead oriented) drive, which currently retails for $480. Given that we've been spoiled aside SSDs over the last few years, we get into't expect to represent blown away past the new push on's blistering upper, merely IT should be fun comparison its performance with other TB-plus hard drives if ample capacity is what you're seeking.

WD Black 4TB in Detail

The Black 4TB (model WD4001FAEX) is one of just a few 4TB hard drives addressable and meets the standard 3.5" form constituent for embarrassing drives measuring 5.78" (147mm) long, 4" (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 average accession time of 4.2ms, and Westerly Digital says it has a drive to drive throughput of 154MB/s, making it the fastest Black strong drive yet.

Disdain being considerably more affordable than the enterprise class Ray 4TB (model WD4000FYYZ), the new Colorful 4TB is remarkably similar. The RE 4TB comes with a higher 1.2 cardinal hour MTBF evaluation every bit well as spread-eagle factory testing to ensure reliability. The pricier translation besides features a short Time-Limited Mistake Recovery (TLER), which is beneficial for to the highest degree RAID setups but a potentially bad thought for single drive configurations.

The technology is designed to forestall calculative drives from prematurely dropping out of RAID arrays and forcing rebuilds, or worse, RAID book loss. However, it can movement performance issues when used in not-RAID configurations. If a hiccup happens on a single drive and no error recovery is possible from the nonexistent supernumerary data, the in operation system or twist controller has to postponemen for the beat back to report back. This can take anywhere from a some to several seconds and bequeath get a system to slack or hang in the process, so information technology's obvious why Midwestern Digital would remove TLER from the Black series.

Despite those differences, the two are allay very similar in design and specifications. The WD Grim 4TB tranquillise uses five 800GB platters rather than four larger 1TB platters, which is a more power hungry set up, but Western Digital says the five-disk design optimizes longevity. When interpretation or writing data, Western Member claims a power use of 10.4 Watts and this drops to 8.1 watts at idle and 1.2 watts in standby.

The Black-market 4TB still features the dual-actuator technology, 64MB of lay away, 6Gb/s SATA tolerate, and a Marvell dual-core restrainer. The 64MB cache is provided away a Winbond W9751G6JB-25 break off which meets the DDR2-800 spec using CL5-5-5 timings.

Western Member has also included its StableTrac and NoTouch technologies. The previous sees that the motor shaft is secured at both ends to reduce vibration, which helps to stabilize the platters for more surgical trailing during read and write operations, spell the latter ensures the transcription heads never touch the phonograph record media, which allows for significantly less wear to the recording head and media likewise Eastern Samoa better drive protection when mobile.

Also of bill, the Black 4TB is backed by a five-yr limited guarantee, which should make disbursal well over $300 happening this drive a little more consolatory.