Western Digital 4TB WD Gold Enterprise Class Internal Hard Drive - 7200 RPM Class, SATA 6 Gb/s, 256 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD4004FRYZ

I have used most the top brands....over the last 10 years. I currently run just under 100TB in my desktop, which mostly consisted of the 6TB 12TB drives...and now updated to 18TB slowly. WD Black and Golds thus far I haven't had a single failure in 15 years..... with EVERY other brand usually being replaced due to failure. One thing..... I do NOT use these as working drives. I use SSD..... i DID use two 6TB ssd in raid 0 for about 5 years with no issues.... I JUST replaced it with an SSD, to gain some speed and another sata port back. 18TB is a LOT of data on one disk. As a photographer I shoot about 5-6 TB per year of pics and video. I have adopted my older 12TB drives as the backups in a box... and added the 18TB last fall and this spring as my onboard archive drives.... Thus far.. they have been great with no issues...and no noise... at least that I have noticed. I don't recommend these for much more than archive and backup..... they make FAST onboard archive drives.... hitting speeds regularly of 190-220MB/sec sustained until you get to the last 25%, then they slow down to the more average 120-150MB/sec Packaging. I have NEVER gotten a drive in an envelope, every drive came in an OEM box with the appropriate cardboard or plastic drive suspender that is in most store boxes. More recently they have come in that and bubble wrapped as well inside the box... with two drives even coming in a special box for two drives suspended. IF YOU SHOULD RECEIVE a drive that was just in some envelope and not in an suspended protector inside the box... most likely its not coming from this seller or is being fulfilled by another party. DOCUMENT The wrapping well and just send it back to avoid any issues. Don't even finish taking the drive out, and ask for one in proper packaging. In my current case of nearly 6 years..(Obsidian 800d). I now only have WD black or Golds... computer never shuts off no failures.

Purchased for a macOS/Windows desktop. Very pleased with the drive, fast for a spinner, doubled my project storage space. Highly recommended if you want increase storage at a good price.

I purchased a WD Gold Data Center 2TB in July 2017. The hard disk is still in use and works very well. I trusted the WD's brand, so I purchased WD Gold Enterprise 8TB on August 4, 2025 to expand my storage. I received the new drive on August 5 afternoon and installed it immediately to my desktop computer. Unfortunately, I could not initialize this new hard disk on my computer (Win11). I always got a "The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error" message in Disk Management. I switched different SATA and power cables to determine the issue. I even put my ear on the hard disk when starting my computers but did not hear any sound of spinning up. The computers' BIOS could not recognize the hard disk, either. It only detected a device attached but showed the storage capacity as "0.0GB" without show the manufacturer information. I put the hard disk to another desktop computer but the issue remained. I am sure the problem was not on my side and assume that the hard disk is dead on arrival, so I returned it. One thing I want to mention is that I chose the "Reduce packaging, ship in manufacturer's packaging" option when I placed the order, so the DOA might be caused by no extra protection in the package. I still trust the WD brand since I have been using its HDD since 2010. I will buy the 8TB Gold Enterprise again and select "Hide what's inside, ship in Amazon's packaging" and hope this will give the HDD more protection like some bubble packs.

These are great HD's and I am using them in my NAS just for extra protection against a failure. I have three of these in my Ubiquiti UNAS Pro and I have not had a problem with them, and they are quiet, and they don't overheat or make any wining noises.

Pros: enterprise HD, high TB

Up Dated 2/18/2025: --- No Problems with the 16TB WD Gold in my Synology NAS DS416Play AND my Synology NAS DS1520+. I also have them in 2 Synology 5bay Expansion Units DX517 connected to my Synology NAS DS1520+. No error codes everything works great. I use the DS416Play for file backups. I use the DS1520+ and both of my Synology 5bay Expansion Units DX517 set up as 3 Volumes for my PLEX Server. ----- "YES Synology updated there Compatible Drive List for at least the Drive List for my Setup." ----- My be yours as well?? ----- But really -- What a GREAT setup. I also have a digital antenna in my attic connected to a Silicon Dust FLEX 4K that is connected to my router. So though PLEX SERVER I get "ALL my Local TV Channels" and ALL In Full HD & a lot more TV channels from Plex Live TV. All sent wirelessly to all my TVs. NO MORE cable tv bill.

I have two Hitachi 2TB hard drives that have been working without problem for about 7 years (7200RPM). One drive has Win 7, Vista and XP on it, and the other drive is for Data (my main Win 10 boot drive is on SSD). But since I sometimes have to use Win 7, and these drives are a bit old, I was looking to replace them with new faster hard drives. I decided to try this Seagate Barracuda 2TB first since it was a low price. I was impressed that it is a single platter with two heads inside and is quiet. Also, when I first did some benchmarking with Crystal it showed over 200MB/s Read and Write. But if I ran it again, the numbers were not consistent and would be as low as 35MB/s. Using HD Tune showed that this drive has major drops in speed across the platter. I cloned my Win 7 over to it, ana it took about 4 minutes to fully boot, no faster than the old Hitachi. The 2 year warranty is also a concern. So I can't really recommend this drive as a OS drive, but would be OK as a backup drive or just a data drive if you don't need fast performance. I have also since then tried this WD Gold 2TB (good performance, but loud disk spinning sound and loud read/write clicks), the Seagate Exos 7E2 and newer Exos 7E8). The WD Gold was the Loudest drive out of the bunch, as I could hear the disk spinning (motor) and loud clicks when read/write. The best drive was the Exos 7E8 at $150. It was actually the quietest drive out of all, and also the fastest with speeds up to 240MBs, also has 5 year warranty that I verified on the Seagate site. When I cloned my Win 7 over to it, the boot time was 1min 45 sec, and remember the Barracuda was 4 minutes. So that right there shows the Exos 7E8 is faster for an OS drive. If the WD Gold drive noise doesn't bother you, then it would be a good drive, but since my PC is in a bedroom, I keep it as quiet as possible.

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