Western Digital 6TB WD Black Performance Internal Hard Drive HDD - 7200 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, 256 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD6003FZBX

I am using this hard drive to play FLAC and WAV files on a KDlinks A400 media player. I consider myself to be something of an audiophile and I love good quality audio. The hard drive that I had been using prior to purchasing this WD Black was the Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM006 (A 2TB hard drive). The Seagate was solid and reliable for roughly two years and I had no complaints. The reason I decided to upgrade to the WD Black 6TB hard was because it was specifically made for multimedia and I wanted to ensure I was futureproof with regards to available hard drive space, so I decided to splurge on the WD Black. When I initially installed the hard drive in my A400, I was disappointed, because the sound was bright and shrill sounding. However, I heard all sorts of detail in my music that I never heard before and overall, the volume was louder as opposed to how the Seagate sounded, so I was a bit conflicted. I had to change the settings on my receiver (Pioneer SC-79) to try to remove that bright and shrill sound. There were a few factory settings on the receiver (Upsampling, Hi-bit32 are what I remember) that I had to turn off or to the lowest setting because they were processing the sound and making it sound artificial along with it sounding bright and shrill. These changes made it sound better, but it was still bright and shrill. I was really disappointed in the WD Black, but I remembered that some electronics require a break in (especially for audio purposes), so instead of giving up and returning the hard drive I figured I'd keep it and hope that it would break in. After about 90 days (not 90 days straight without shutting it off, but just playing it whenever I had time to listen to music or wanted music playing in the background), I noticed a magical thing. One morning, I sat down and turned it on and I noticed for a few hours that I did not get up because my music was sounding especially good. My music was extremely clear, the music had excellent detail (far more than the Seagate) and the volume was louder than the Seagate. The sound coming out of my speakers was something I was not prepared for (in a good way). I figured maybe I was just in some sort of a good mood and wanted to listen to music. Well, I made it a point to turn on my system for the next few days as time permitted and it sounded so much better (as opposed to Day 1) to the point of not wanting to get up and move on with my day. Another observation I noticed after the break-in is that the music has a "darker background". it's hard to describe what I mean but think about it like this. If you know what "white noise" is in the background, this hard drive seems to deliver less of that sort of sound. You hear more of the artist and instrumentation. It even made the difference between FLAC files and WAV files less pronounced. What I mean by this is that some albums I have ripped in both FLAC and WAV. WAV is the absolute best sound (between the two), but FLAC is close. it was far more noticeable on the Seagate drive, but less noticeable on this WD Black. In closing this review, if anyone is buying this for audio purposes, I suggest exercising some patience with the break in and if you are using a receiver, turn off anything that is processing the sound (similar to what I mentioned above). The audio output from this hard drive is pure. Read the owners manual and find any audio processing settings that are turned on as a default. There may be some things you leave on and you may also have to do some EQ adjustments, bass, treble, etc. but the result is well worth it. Exercise some patience with your receiver and you will be rewarded. As for my A400, there are some settings on that for optimal audio output that I'll be covering in my updated review on that whenever I get around to it. It is seriously a good piece for music. I did NOT expect anything special from a higher end hard drive other than available storage space, but I have been pleasantly surprised and I no longer regret my purchase as I did on Day 1. I highly recommend this hard drive for audio purposes. in fact, I cannot recommend it enough. Hope this helps with your purchase decision.

I have my OS on an SSD and files (media, docs, music) on an HDD. This solution allows fast boot times, keeps my costs low, and allows me to work on OS and data separately - whether it is to clean reinstall Windows every year or so, or to replace the HDD with a larger one. Was running out of space on a 1.8 TB Seagate, and decided to jump on this WD Black 6TB. Replacement was relatively easy. I had run out of SATA cables / power cables on my setup. Opened up the ones connected to the DVD drive and plugged this drive in. The first one seemed to be a DoA - did not spin up. Amazon was great as usual and shipped the replacement super quick. The second one worked great. Since this is greater than 2TB, it was not recognized readily by Windows 10. I had to go into My Computer -> Manage -> Disk Management, set up the volume, and make it online. I installed Clonezilla on USB, rebooted using the USB, and followed through with the instructions to clone my existing HDD into the new one. After cloning with CloneZilla, it is important to unplug the old drive before rebooting - since it will copy the same drive ID to the new drive, and the OS will get confused seeing 2 drives with the same ID. That done, reboot was complete. Since CloneZilla clones like for like, I could only see 1.8 TB of the drive. Another visit to the same My Computer -> Manage -> Disk Management, clicking on Actions -> Rescan disks, and I was able to see the rest of the 6TB as unallocated. It was easy to extend the online volume over the entire disk to get to see the entire 6TB. Performance numbers from Crystal Disk Mark are attached as a screenshot. Please note that I reduced the test to 100MB instead of 1GB.

I've been using WD hd's since the early 90's and they've been consistently reliable for me, more so than their peers, which I why I tend to gravitate towards them when buying hd's. To be honest it's been years since I've bought one since my pc is all SSD or at least it was until I installed this drive. Previously my fastest hd was a wd velociraptor but this one is very fast for a mechanical drive. I'd hoped that the Seagate hamr drives would be available to the public by now but alas enterprise customers only. I needed large capacity storage and a 4tb ssd is $600 so this was a happy medium that I could live with. I have included my crystaldiskinfo drive test so you can see my throughput. My system is an AMD X570 with a R9 3900X that was using a crucial mx500 2tb sata ssd for storage but its just not enough room for my 4k videos. I don't hear much drive noise when its active but then again my Cooler Master HAF932 case is loaded with fans and I tend to hear my gpu and aio fans above everything else so they could be drowning it out. Bottom line is that if you need a new hd this one would not disappoint you for a mechanical drive. I keep my games on my ssd's so I cannot comment on things like loading times from them but you see the drive test so you know what I"m getting out of it.

I am using WD hard dries for years and it’s not the only brand that I have experienced through years. Honestly I never had a hard drive failure or break down but I have had always the concern and fear of these mechanical components soon or late so I did always followed a straight forward backup plan on everything I felt it’s important and that made me to buy even more HDDs and this black version of WD 6TB is just the last one I purchased. I have to testify that the speed of this HDD exceeded my own expectations and since it is installed in my desktop case, I don’t hear any extra noises when it is working. I am not a gamer but I am doing a lot of video editing and files are big and it was my biggest motivation to spend more money for the brand that I have a very high trust with. For those who are interested in trying this product and not quite familiar with the computer, please keep in mind that any hard drive over 2TB needs to be recognized by windows and it doesn’t happen automatically after installation so you have to open the disk management utility and allocate the drive which means that you have to format it and if you need partitions, it’s coming up next until you assign a letter for your drive and possibly a short discription and then you are good to go for whatever you are planning to do with the drive. I would absolutely recommend this seller, however I didn’t try their support because nothing bad ever happened.

I have had good experiences with WD hard drives through the years. I don't have the money to purchase a large SSD so this drive was my comprimise. So far the experience has been really good. The drive is faster than the one it replaced. The new WD 3.5" 6tb drive provides plenty of needed space over the WD 2.5" 700gb it replaced. It did take me a while to divide into maximun partition sizes under Windows 10 which as far as I can tell is 3tb. So I divided it into two 3tb partitions one of which is the operating system. Someday I hope this limitation is overcome so that the entire 6tb can be one partition which is recognized as the system drive. Now durability is the only issue that remains unknown. The system runs 24/7 so it is burning in and in a year I will be comforted as to its future durability. This is why I only give it a 4 star rating. In time I hope I can give it a hearty 5 star.

This hard drive runs very well, and noticeably faster than my older 2TB Western Digital Black hard drive, which this drive replaces. I think the performance increase is due to the larger cache. The new 6TB drive is my new "Working" install drive, and the 2TB is my new repurposed "Storage" drive. My OS is on a fast M.2 NVME drive. Physically, the drive installs just like any other drive in its class, and the BIOS recognized it without a hitch. My PC is six years old as a reference. After some planning, and the use of a couple of disk copy and partitioning software, the install completed beautifully. Note: you might need 3rd party software if you plan to copy an old drive and partition the new drive the way you want it. As for shipping, I was worried when it arrived. The packaged was a lightly padded bag which contained the hard drive box, which is little bigger than the drive itself. The bag was not even stamped "Fragile" as I thought it should. Good thing that the drive box was sturdy. The package arrived sound, and in good condition. My primary uses for this drive is for gaming and 3D art and animation. I am very pleased with the performance of this drive, and have not experienced any issues with it. Enjoy!

I've been running two of these drives in raid 0 for a year now, only putting unimportant or cloud-backed data on them. so far so great. they are indeed pretty loud when benchmarking or doing multiple writes, but unless you are sitting right up against your computer case, a youtube video or some music easily drowns them out. I use these as my main game drives and the speed has been amazing for hard disks. the raid 0 helps I'm sure but even still I'm impressed. the RPM is 7200 which is pretty standard but the read head must be going light speed in there, because compared to other 7200 drives I've used, it's no match.

I've been building my own computers for >25 years. I have been using (up until now) WD drives as they are high quality and have a good warranty. In 25 years, I only had one fail (years ago) out of probably >30 that I purchased. This was until I got one now. I installed it on my computer like all the other ones, but the drive does not show up in BIOS. It obviously does not show up on Win either. I contacted support and talked with several people in India. All the emails I sent prior to this, all the screenshots were for nothing. Person I talked with did not know anything about this. I then did online RMA as instructed, paid for shipping to WD, sent them a very carefully packaged drive in the original box and I got email from them saying that they are returning it to me because of something.... they are not sure based on their reply. Well RIP WD, I will NEVER buy a drive from you again. Once a good company and now this. You should be ashamed of yourselves.

J'ai acheté ce disque dur de 8To pour faire du montage vidéo sur un nouveau PC. Dès que j'ai monté et allumé l'ordinateur, toute la caisse de la tour s'est mise à vibrer et à faire un bruit d'avion qui décolle insupportable. J'ai donc contacté le support Western Digital pour faire un échange standard. Je vous passe toute la procédure, les formulaires, l'envoi du disque... ils ont testé l'engin et ont conclu à la même chose que moi : il y avait un défaut d'équilibre des plateaux du disque et donc - même si le DD fonctionnait - il aurait à terme fini par défaillir. Donc, ils ont accepté l'échange standard. Seulement il n'y en avait pas en stock. La production asiatique n'arrive pas à fournir, à cause des arrêts intempestifs des usines à cause de la CoVid19, donc il fallait attendre... Et j'ai attendu 1 long mois et demi. Je les ai appelé dans le laps temps pour savoir où cela en était et ils m'ont à chaque fois répondu qu'ils attendaient aussi des livraisons. Le disque dur est enfin arrivé, je l'ai monté dans le PC et celui-là ne fait aucun bruit, à part un petit sifflement quand il démarre, ou un petit "cloc" quand les têtes se déverrouillent, mais rien que de très normal pour un 7000 tours. Depuis il fonctionne très bien et j'espère qu'il va durer car j'ai tous mes films de famille dessus. (J'ai des backups sur plusieurs BluRay tout de même et un NAS au cas où). J'en suis très content.

UPDATE: Nov 19 2019 - 3 months in, running great, still fast, zero problems. UPDATE 2: Nov 2020 - 15 months in and is still running perfect. No probs. This review is for the 6 TB WD Black WD6003FZBX-00K5WB0 I'm using several WD Blacks in my current system, including: 2 TB WD Black WD2003FZEX-00Z4SA0 3 TB WD Black WD3003FZEX-00Z4SA0 5 TB WD Black WD5001FZWX-00ZHUA0 and now this new 6 TB WD Black WD6003FZBX-00K5WB0 After installing the drive in my desktop PC, I initialized GPT and formatted NTFS in Win 10 Pro 1903. The binary / base 10 conversion left 5.45 TB usable, which is what I was expecting. I don't like to fill HDD's past 90 - 95 % capacity for overhead / drive optimization purposes, so I consider this roughly just over 5 TB's of usable drive. I knew this going in - no surprises there. I was concerned pre-purchase by several consumer complaints (mostly 2017 / 2018) about excessive noise and grinding. I'm really baffled by this. For me this 6 TB is the quietest and fastest of the WD Black drives I own, with the 3 TB WD Black WD3003FZEX-00Z4SA0 being easily the loudest, and the 5 TB WD Black WD5001FZWX-00ZHUA0 being the second loudest. I can only guess that WD may have previously had a bad batch ? or they have refined the manufacture process to eliminate previous problems? I say that because this 6 TB WD Black shows a manufacture date of Dec 6 2018, so it could be a newer manufacture process. And putting it through it's paces in benches and real world tests it is not as loud as my other black drives. In addition to the attached drive transfer speed pictures, the drive will reach burst transfer speeds in excess of 1 to 1.5 GB/s maintained for a few seconds, monitored in Win 10 Pro 1903. The average sustained transfer speed, now that the drive is 60 % full, tends to be anywhere form 155 - 170 MB/s. That's a rough average and is dependent on transfer source size, what else is being used, etc. Note the attached screenshots show benches at 0 % and 59 % full, showing some speed drop off - that's normal as the drive fills up, but it's still excellent performance for an HDD. These are not SSD speeds, but neither is this a 6TB SSD price. The price / performance here is a sweet spot for high capacity / performance uses like a video editing source content drive, or similar scenarios where this is a companion drive to an O/S and program SSD. As the drive is less than a month old I can't comment on longevity but I'll update and report back if I find any problems. This drive has the standard 5 yr warranty offered on all WD black drives. This drive runs a few degrees Celsius higher than my other WD Blacks but it's still well within spec. Under prolonged load it tends to run high 30's - while the others are mid 30's. This is in an airflow optimized Fractal Design R5 case with additional 140 mm Noctua fans cooling the well spaced drive stack. I do a considerable amount of editing and this drive holds a lot of my footage. I'm using Win 10 Pro and Sony Vegas installed on a 500 GB Samsung 970 EVO NVMe. I have 20 + TB of data spread across two desktop systems and archival backup boxes. That said I'm still a hobby editor and for me it's still just not feasible to spend the thousands of dollars it would cost to switch 20 TB over to SSD's. But I am seriously considering buying two more of these because the real world performance is excellent - better than I expected actually. I wish they were cheaper, but in Canada it tends to normally run within $10 - $20 of it's closest rival, the 6 TB Pro 7200 rpm offering from the other guys at ***gate. The system I'm testing with: i9 9900K 64 GB DDR4 Gigabyte Z390 Master mobo MSI GTX 1080 750 W Gold PSU 4 x 7200 rpm HDD's 1 x 5400 rpm HDD Win 10 Pro and programs on a 500 GB Samsung 970 EVO NVMe 10 / 10 would buy this drive again.

Excelente producto, me encantó el performance, lo utilizo para jugar con máquinas virtuales y almacenamiento de datos y la vdd no le pide nada a uno de estado sólido, el ruido que hace cuando está en máximo desempeño no es muy ruidoso le puse 4 estrellitas solo porque hay más silenciosos, en general es un excelente producto.

Hard disk costoso ma la differenza in velocità con prodotti simili si vede. I giochi anche molto ma molto pesanti si avviano piu velocemente. L hard disk arriva imballato bene. Una volta installato nel PC non risulta rumoroso. Il mio PC non lo ha riconosciuto. È possibile bastato inizializzarlo e tutto è andato a buon fine. 6 TB di velocità x gaming

Bien un bulk et non un EOM, donc la garantie 5 ans fonctionne 256Mo cache contrairement au descriptif (mais conformément à la description constructeur) En remplacement d'un green 7200 rpm également, la différence de vitesse est flagrante (de l'ordre du double) Seul bémols, sans surprise: - le disque doit être impérativement placé dans un boîtier ventilé (température mesurée en charge à 40°C juste derrière un ventilateur 120mm à 900rpm) - même monté sur supports silicone dans un boîtier insonorisé, le bruit de grattement est présent (mais pas obscène)