This HDD is suitable to use as a storage drive on your desktop PC. It isn't the fastest, but has plenty of space to dump your stuff on.It is now considered "End of life" as of mid-2024 and replaced by the 256MB cache variant. (The older one has 128MB cache.) ...So check before you buy!It is very quiet.It has aggressive power-down behaviour that will reduce the life of the drive (constantly powering up and down isn't healthy for any hard drive!)You can disable its aggressive power-down behaviour with WDIDLE3 (found in Ultimate Boot CD). Simply plug this drive as your only drive on your system, boot up Ultimate Boot CD and disable the power-down behaviour.

Bad Product, Bad Customer Sevice and Support.

Hard Drive arrived DOA. It will not turn on on, I try different comp computers, and it will not work. I called over the phone in order to replace for another hard drive, same model, but none over phone could understand what I wanted it despite my detailed explanation and the end the person over the phone said, we will send a replacement. It didn't happened. Its really disappointing.Order 0021852598, Placed: Mar 27, 2024, Total $125.19. WD Blue 3.5in PC Hard Drive - 8TB, SKU: WD80EAAZ, Cache Size:256 MB.

Drives work, Customer service at WD does not.

The drives work. The customer service is horrible. I took my case and all the back and forth conversations between myself and the CS team here. I'm using it for training of my own customer service team as, "What not to do to a client." This was a one time buy with my personal account, that I will never use again. The WD Customer service team has made it so I will only ever buy from the competition. Now, I may be just one person to WD, but the company this "one person" works for buys around 25K HDD a year on the B2B side. I'm going to do whatever I can to make sure we start buying from Seagate.

False positive for bad drive?

The customer support was great although it was by far the most obtuse route I've ever seen (if you contact them they'll have you call a number that puts you on hold that sends you a text that hyperlinks to a website that eventually puts you in a chatroom. Don't remember the full detail just that it was badly indirect even by DMV or unemployment office standards but the person was helpful). I'd thought this was a failing drive with seemingly random stuttering trying to watch an old 900p video that would then play it fine trying again later, userbenchmark benched it at 6.3%--yeah seriously. It kept acting weird too which was a shame as it was half full by then. Detected no problems with the drive, crystaldisk showed poor read and very poor write speed, but every ... MoreThe customer support was great although it was by far the most obtuse route I've ever seen (if you contact them they'll have you call a number that puts you on hold that sends you a text that hyperlinks to a website that eventually puts you in a chatroom. Don't remember the full detail just that it was badly indirect even by DMV or unemployment office standards but the person was helpful). I'd thought this was a failing drive with seemingly random stuttering trying to watch an old 900p video that would then play it fine trying again later, userbenchmark benched it at 6.3%--yeah seriously. It kept acting weird too which was a shame as it was half full by then. Detected no problems with the drive, crystaldisk showed poor read and very poor write speed, but every diagnostic tool said was fine, not fragmented, optimized, not filled with disk errors etc. Finally after going to UBM again the disk flatly wasn't even being detected anymore or giving me stats on testing it. After having to pull the drive out to find drive info for the rep and plugging it back in I think a different order or cable or something it started working fine. This is not the first review and apologies for one egg. I will say though that I'm knocking an egg off because I tried unplugging/replugging before and to this day am not sure what the problem was, or if it was truly user error and the cable wasn't seated correctly (but then why was I able to use it and it would work fine then suddenly barely work with bad transfer rates as opposed to not working at all? Or consistently working poorly?) I've seen a lot of bad reviews after all this and think it's plausible that there's a lot of bad drives out there, refurbs, idk what, but as of this writing it works fine. I've not had 10fps trying to play lower quality videos since. I still am not sure if I would put it past the drive to start acting weird again but right now it's been working for a week or two as normal and had it running for under a month although other reviews make me leery after that experience. Recommend? Eh. I mean frankly it's cheap enough and on sale enough that if you get a genuinely failed drive or DOA it is Western Digital so while you can't RMA it through Newegg after a short while the company will try to help you even if you end up paying postage or partial cost of the drive or whatever and if they didn't it wouldn't be a big loss. Don't regret the purchase, happy now.

I got a dud

I bought this drive on sale at an old unbeatable price (less than 11 per gig). Unfortunately, I got a dud that was unrecognizable by all of the computers I could try. I know it wasn’t the dock, cable, or ports at fault; because they work regularly with other drives. I even spent some time chatting with WD support, and they confirmed that there was nothing else that could be done to make it work. I’ve known and trusted this brand for years, so am loathe to give such a low review. Hopefully the replacement drive will work (and continue working for years and years). The replacement process was relatively simple/painless, but I wish it wasn’t necessary.

I've purchased 8 of these 4 TB Blue

I have purchased 8 of these 3.5” Blue 4TB drives, two at a time, since the beginning of June this year (so over the last five months). So far, I have been exceptionally pleased with their initial health and subsequent performance. Crystal Disk Info showed each of them at 1 Power On Count, 0 Hours, so they are indeed brand new. 7 of the 8 have been used as external/offline storage, and 1 of them has been put into an active system. I know that 5 months is not a very long time to decide durability – especially since most of these are offline storage – but let me just say this: what I’ve asked the drives to do, they’ve done to my satisfaction, so I’m a happy man. And it gives me confidence recommending them to others. Another reason I’m recommending them is because they ... MoreI have purchased 8 of these 3.5” Blue 4TB drives, two at a time, since the beginning of June this year (so over the last five months). So far, I have been exceptionally pleased with their initial health and subsequent performance. Crystal Disk Info showed each of them at 1 Power On Count, 0 Hours, so they are indeed brand new. 7 of the 8 have been used as external/offline storage, and 1 of them has been put into an active system. I know that 5 months is not a very long time to decide durability – especially since most of these are offline storage – but let me just say this: what I’ve asked the drives to do, they’ve done to my satisfaction, so I’m a happy man. And it gives me confidence recommending them to others. Another reason I’m recommending them is because they are PMR drives, NOT SMR. You probably know that ‘SMR’ stands for ‘Shingled Magnetic Recording’ - which basically means that every time the drive needs to write new data, it has to rip up nearby unrelated data to perform the new write because the tracks are so narrow and squished together. Not too hard to realize this is hazardous for a number of reasons, not the least of which being the longevity of your drive. Thankfully, the 4 TB Blue drives are not SMR. (Due note: the 3.5” 2 TB & 6 TB Blue drives are SMR, so steer clear of them. So are the 2.5” 1 & 2 TB Blues. ) A word of advice to Windows users also – these drives do NOT come pre-formatted! You HAVE to go into ‘Disk Management’ and format them yourself. When you first get to ‘Disk Management’, a dialog box will pop up, asking you to “Initialize the Disk”. Be SURE to select ‘GPT’, NOT ‘MBR’! I see reviews which complain about “I formatted the disk and only got 2TB”, this will happen if you pick ‘MBR’ when you initialize the disk. As always with data, never trust anything important to just one drive. I have owned 15+ WD Blue HDDs of various sizes (excluding the 8 in my review), and I’ve been blessed with only 1 hard failure and 2 soft failures in the past 6-7 years. It gives me confidence that these 4 TB drives will exhibit the same longevity and performance as their predecessors.

Not just a whopping amount of data storage space,

I do a lot of video editing... a LOT. My PC's 2 TB hard drive was constantly filling up and as a result I have been struggling to remove enough files to have sufficient space for more editing, and have over a dozen external hard drives, in many cases with redundant files.It was time for an upgrade, and the solution was to add a second internal drive, this time a whopping 4 TB of data, to the PC. This would not only give me the space to keep files I need handy, but also to start sorting thru the externals and removing duplications and freeing up THAT space as well.Western Digital is a name I've used with confidence for many years, and when I saw the extremely reasonable price for this hard drive I was VERY happy. Now I am stress-free and my data management has ... MoreI do a lot of video editing... a LOT. My PC's 2 TB hard drive was constantly filling up and as a result I have been struggling to remove enough files to have sufficient space for more editing, and have over a dozen external hard drives, in many cases with redundant files.It was time for an upgrade, and the solution was to add a second internal drive, this time a whopping 4 TB of data, to the PC. This would not only give me the space to keep files I need handy, but also to start sorting thru the externals and removing duplications and freeing up THAT space as well.Western Digital is a name I've used with confidence for many years, and when I saw the extremely reasonable price for this hard drive I was VERY happy. Now I am stress-free and my data management has room to breathe while I use downtime from editing to clean up more space.Very highly recommend this drive.

THE WORST CUSTOMER BUYING EXPERIENCE EVER!!!

THE WORST customer buying experience ever. WD shipped me the wrong product. They aren't even capable of replacing the drive with the one that I purchased. They told me they could only RMA return the product that was shipped and that I would have to attempt another purchase to get what I ordered. Seriously?! They offered a 20% discount, but I told them I would be purchasing Seagate hard drives from now on because of this experience.

WD80EAZZ - Quality cold storage drive.

Very nice HDD for "cold storage".I bought this 8TB in Nov-22 for $120.I already have a fast pc and fast storage. I have a 1TB of arguably the fastest PCIe4x4 nand SSD, a 960GB Optane SSD, and a cold storage 3TB Seagate HDD and they were getting filled with stuff I didn't actively use and didn't want to redo or redownload. My long term backup method to optical(or M-disc) takes too long for anything but the most valuable data, and an 8TB SSD costs too much to justify.This 8TB drive will give me a lot more space to keep what I want. It also does sequential R/W in Crystaldiskmark of over 200MB/s compared to the 140MB/s of the other smaller HDDs I have and 5x as fast as my 340Mb/s cable internet download speed when the internet is perfect.My drive came straight ... MoreVery nice HDD for "cold storage".I bought this 8TB in Nov-22 for $120.I already have a fast pc and fast storage. I have a 1TB of arguably the fastest PCIe4x4 nand SSD, a 960GB Optane SSD, and a cold storage 3TB Seagate HDD and they were getting filled with stuff I didn't actively use and didn't want to redo or redownload. My long term backup method to optical(or M-disc) takes too long for anything but the most valuable data, and an 8TB SSD costs too much to justify.This 8TB drive will give me a lot more space to keep what I want. It also does sequential R/W in Crystaldiskmark of over 200MB/s compared to the 140MB/s of the other smaller HDDs I have and 5x as fast as my 340Mb/s cable internet download speed when the internet is perfect.My drive came straight from WD and was manufactured in Oct-22.And like most that buy them it ran perfectly and I expect it to last as long as the still running WD Blue 1TB in my daughter's PC that I picked up in 2011.Also it is not clicky like the old Velociraptor HDD I have in the office.It is often slow for things like games, and isn't the best choice for continuous reading and writing, but that isn't what I got it for. If I store a modded game on it and I want to play it for more than a few hours I will likely drag that folder to a faster drive. If I want to backup my phone's photos/videos the WD can hold them until I save them permanently. If I have a video project that is taking too much space, to the WD it can go.Tons of space that is fast enough for cold storage.

Warning: Sub Par Model, Dead on Arrival

Device came new in decent packaging, direct from Western Digital. However, I noticed immediately that it was the EZAZ version which is SMR (Single Magnetic Recording) version. This means it is significantly slower writing large files than other Blue products I have owned. I was just using for storage so even though I was disappointed, I tried to use it. The drive would not initialize. It would throw IO errors across multiple known good power and sata connections. Shady to list it as a Blue product when its obviously a sub par model, this means I can no longer trust the companies own performance branding to give me the product I want from ANY vendor. Compound this having it be DOA from the factory, makes me question using WD products anymore. I have been an advocate ... MoreDevice came new in decent packaging, direct from Western Digital. However, I noticed immediately that it was the EZAZ version which is SMR (Single Magnetic Recording) version. This means it is significantly slower writing large files than other Blue products I have owned. I was just using for storage so even though I was disappointed, I tried to use it. The drive would not initialize. It would throw IO errors across multiple known good power and sata connections. Shady to list it as a Blue product when its obviously a sub par model, this means I can no longer trust the companies own performance branding to give me the product I want from ANY vendor. Compound this having it be DOA from the factory, makes me question using WD products anymore. I have been an advocate of theirs for 20 years until this. I will be attempting to return. Will see how well they handle this