Western Digital 4 TB Desktop Hard Drive - Blue

This was bought as a replacement hard drive for one that stopped working. It has continued to work since I bought it 6 years ago so the durability of it speaks for itself. The 4TB size of it is great if you want to store pictures on it. It was very easy to set up too and was compatible with windows 10 at the time and works with windows 11 too. I would recommend it and would buy it again.

If you look for a drive for all your FullHD/4K video or other media storage, this is the one to pick. It comes as an OEM, so prepare/buy one SATA cable and you're good to go. Drive warranty can be easily checked on on WD support website (just type "WD warranty" in Google, it's the top result) and it's 2 years from the date of manufacture. Drive is almost inaudible and produces just a little vibration so as long as You have a proper case, you won't hear or feel it working. The capacity of 4TB means 3,63TB for your data and preparing it to work under Windows 7/10 takes seconds. Speed will vary for different file types: on single big file I get 160+ MB/s on both read & write. For huge amounts of smaller files (photos etc.) it changes dynamically, varying from aroung 50 to 110 MB/s for both read and write. Tested on i5-6500 + 8GB RAM + MSI Z170M Mortar. Summary: great quality drive for all consumer data storage, providing nice speeds & low noise level. Warranty could last one year longer, but for such low price it's not even bothering that much. Must-have addition for main SSD drive. Protip: to make sure you get drive with full, 2-year warranty, make sure you buy directly (!) from Amazon as a seller. In some cases it may hit you with a few pounds more but will guarantee that the drive isn't a refurbished/recertified one, with warranty limited to a few months.

Bought and put in a custom build tower 2+ years ago. Works perfectly for all the steam games I put on it (so far 50+)

The drive itself is flawless - really good speeds and no weird sounds. So what I'm about to say might not make sense. I removed a star because of the way it came packaged. It was just wrapped in some bubble wrap, no box, no warranty, etc. I don't mind this too much because the drive was priced well, but still, I think just to eliminate drive failure on delivery this should have come in a box & it would have been good to include some paper warranty.

This disk is part of a windows server used at home. Excellent disk, very quite and fast, with write speeds ( measured for large files over 2 GB ) of over 400MB per second. Planning to acquire another one soon. However, setting up the disk was a learning experience, as this is not quite the same as a disk of <= 2TB . You need to be aware that there are two kinds of hard drive disk: MBR disk and GPT disk. MBR is the abbreviation of Master Boot Record, which use the standard BIOS, supports up to 2TB capacity. And the GPT (GUID Partition Table) disk which uses UEFI (unified extensible firmware interface), supports disk with more than 2TB capacity. Check whether your mother board is UEFI compatible, otherwise you may not be able to install this disk. It is necessary to convert MBR disk to GPT disk before you can format it. Bear in mind that Windows Disk Management can only convert an empty MBR disk to GPT disk. If the disk is not empty, you will find that “Convert to GPT Disk” option is disabled. If the disk is empty, the windows disk tool will take care of the partition and formatting requirements. If the disk is not empty, you will need to use a third party disk partitioning tool to migrate the disk data.

A venerable SATA 300 disc, in constant use since 2007, started to rumble. Clear signs it needed to be replaced in a WIN10 rig running a legacy BIOS. I decided on the WD BLUE 4TB as the replacement. There is a simple procedure to be followed to install a non-bootable 4TB HDD in WIN10. * Physically fit the disc. * Run Computer Management (compmgmt.msc) and from there, run Disk Management. Locate your new HDD in the table and click on it. You will be invited to initialise it as MBR or GPT. You must choose GPT because MBR will only make 2TB of your new disc available. A GPT disc can only be booted using UEFI and not a Legacy BIOS. In my case this is not a bootable disc so the BIOS is irrelevant. This takes a matter of seconds. * Now click on the HDD again and Quick Format it as NTFS. This is the only option that will give you access to the 4TB. This takes a few seconds. It is not a full format that would take many hours. * Your disc is now available to use. The entire process took less than five minutes. My new disc is very quiet and much faster than its predecessor. Why a tale of two discs? The first disc I received was faulty. I could not initialise it as either MBR or GPT. Disk Management just hung when I tried it. I returned the disc as faulty. A big thankyou to Amazon for their excellent returns system. The replacement knew what it was supposed to do and performed exactly as it should. I have a number of WD discs of various ages and sizes. None has ever failed me. I hope this one follows the trend.

A nice hard drive with excellent performance and reliability. I always use WD drives in both my NAS and desktop computers and have never really had a problem. Update: June 2020 I finally decided to register my drives for warranty and 1 I bough last year says "out of region" but still gives me warranty until end of this year and the drive I bought in may this year, has the 2 years with no problems. The packaging is pretty poor but the drives are running and reporting well. The Blue drives are targetted at Desktop systems and the Reds are targetted at NAS systems but with the SMR disks in the Red line now and only in the 2TB and 6TB models of blue, a 4TB Blue is pretty safe for small Nas devices for the time being. Nice reliable drives and definitely recommended

As of Jan 2018, these 4TB drives seem to be the best value "sweet spot" for hard disk storage. Two of these drives in a simple RAID 1 mirror configuration will hopefully securely and reliably store all my photos and media for several years. No messing around with complex disk pools and virtual drives in order to get a decent capacity. Note that they are not the fastest drives - look elsewhere if you need the best performance from mechanical hard disks, and don't want to make the leap to solid state drives (which are still considerably more expensive per TB).