Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsGreat choice if you need high capacity / performance without paying SSD prices
Reviewed in Canada on August 12, 2019
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.
