Western Digital 2TB WD Black Performance Internal Hard Drive HDD - 7200 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, 64 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD2003FZEX

A Western Digital Black SATA drive has been the storage drive on my family's Dell XPS desktop system since 2017. It is where all of my kids' baby photos, videos of first steps, vacations, and other memories are kept. Of course I have backups onto external hard drives, and with a cloud storage service, but it all starts with the WD Black. And the drive has been absolutely perfect for eight long years. There hasn't been so much as a hiccup, read error, corrupted file, or anything in all that time. I'm talking performance reliability of an impossible 100% over all that time.I'm now shopping for a new desktop computer, and wanted to have the same setup with a big secondary drive for storage. While I looked at other brands, I figured why tempt the devil? This time I bought a Western Digital Black with 8 TB of storage. I connected it as a third internal drive on that old XPS system, and copied all of the files to it. Connection was easy, transfer speeds were great, and I have no doubt it will be a trustworthy, safe place to keep family memories for the next eight years.

Honestly I'm quite impressed with the performance, I'm coming from a 1tb Toshiba drive that I've had for 8 years. I'm able to transfer 25gb of data between drives in less than 2 minutes and the initial transfer speed is really fast too so smaller gb files get transferred in mere seconds. I think it probably has to do with that cache but honestly I'm impressed with the real world usage performance. They handle large files very well and transferring between a usb 3.1 drive is really fast for a hard drive!

Arrived quickly, and is in perfect health (Checked it before I started transferring my files)It's receiving 3 TB of files, and it is staying nice and cool and running smooth.

Very high throughput even out to 4 GB written in one big go.

UPDATE 3/26/15:This drive will make audible noises when accessing the data on the drive, but it gives pretty good speed. Even with the third replacement, it makes noises, so I'll just have to deal with it.The speed is pretty great. I wish this wasn't as loud as it is now. It sometimes bothers to hear the drive making access noise whenever I launch Adobe After Effects, but I can live with it.~Simon.UPDATE 3/17/15:I received the replacement drive to find out that it has a similar (ticking sound while accessing data) symptom. I resorted to calling the WD Customer Support.The customer service representative was really helpful. He told me that the problem might be the bad cable. I switched the older SATA cable with a newer SATA cable I happened to have on the computer to find the problem still existing, so I told him about it.The support said he will send me a third replacement drive since both of the hard drives are giving me the same problems. I was a little conflicted because that meant I will have to pay for an extra return label. I voiced my concerns to the support, and the support said he will make me prepaid shipping labels--two labels--for the two (maybe not-so defective) drives I have to return.Also, the "some complicated and strict return instructions" happened to be for the people returning hard drives in a bulk. I'm just an end-user, so the support clarified that I can just return the hard drives in the original packaging.So, people, web replacement support may sound more convenient, but calling the tech support proved to be much better. At least for me and my situation.If any of you have some noisy drives, try switching the SATA cable to a newer one. Apparently, this drive works better and tolerably quieter with a newer SATA cable (thus, the two drives I have to return may not be defective).~SimonEnd of update. Old review below.== Edit Start ==Well, I think I gave a horrible rating at the beginning, but bad start is a bad start, I guess.At least the clicking drive worked. The shipping fee I have to pay for returning is around 7 dollars, which was what threw me off.Also, the billing address have to be the same as replacement shipping address. That also threw me off, deducting one whole star.Anyways, I hope no more problem exists with this new drive they sent me.== Edit End ==This drive works, but it's making abnormally loud clicking noises whenever it is reading off or writing on the disk. It's so much louder than my other (regular) hard drives I don't feel safe using Adobe After Effects with this drive.I submitted a replacement request through WD's website, but the steps there is just horribly laid out. It's not easy navigating through the website for support. Also, you have to pay the shipping fee for replacing the already defective product with WD. Also, WD is practicing some complicated and strict return instructions.I mean, come on! You shipped the clicking drive at the first place!

Easy install, works great with decent write speed (transferred 1.4TB from nvme to the hdd in about 1.5hrs). Was exactly as advertised 10/10. Will definitely be buying another when I need it.