Western Digital Black 4TB Hard Drive Review

Read Bandwidth

For this benchmark, HD Tune Pro was used. It shows the potential read speed which you are likely to experience with these storage devices. We don’t put much stock in Burst speed readings and thus we no longer included it. The most important number is the Average Speed number. This number will tell you what to expect from a given drive in normal, day to day operations. The higher the average the faster your entire system will seem.

Write Performance

For this benchmark HD Tune Pro was used. To run the write benchmark on a drive, you must first remove all partitions from that drive and then and only then will it allow you to run this test. Unlike some other benchmarking utilities the HD Tune Pro writes across the full area of the drive, thus it easily shows any weakness a drive may have.



While it may not match the numbers posted by the newest RE drive, the Black 4TB is still one of the fastest hard drives on the market. Compare and contrast these results to the last generation 2TB Black which averaged a mere 115MB/s reads and 109MB/s writes and you can see Western Digital have not been idle between generations. Unfortunately, their latest contender is noticeably slower than the 1TB per platter Seagate Barracuda 3TB.

So why the performance difference between the RE and Black in this chart? On paper at least, the RE's latency is slightly lower which may point to some changes in the dual processors' algorithms. It also seems like the Black has been engineered with quiet operation in mind since it was able to remain relatively silent when seeking across its platters.