Western Digital Releases High-Performance 4TB Hard Drive

For about a year and a half now, the largest capacity you could get in a single 3.5” hard disk without accompanying enclosure was 3TB (3000GB). Eventually Hitachi released some 4TB models, but now those drives have some competition from Western Digital. True to its name, the new WD Black WD4001FAEX trades the silent, steady operation typical of such high-capacity drives for all-out high performance.

Alongside the massive capacity are a full 7200 RPM rotational speed, 64MB of cache, SATA III 6Gbps interface compatibility, dual-stage actuator technology for faster seek performance, a dual-core microcontroller, and an enticing five-year warranty, among others. The official datasheet gives a sustained data rate of 154MB/s – I'm assuming that's an average, but either way, using one of these as a mass storage drive for things like video editing would be a decent idea.

Anyway, the Western Digital Black 4TB hard drives are stamped with $339 USD MSRP's and should be hitting computer stores over the next couple of weeks. (Via StorageReview).

Update:  The Western Digital Black 4TB hard drives are now available at Amazon and other sites.