I would recommend this product to anyone, I have used WD brand since the IDE days over 30 years ago seldom straying the WD path. In those decades I have personally used IDE, EIDE, SATA, Velociraptors, Greens, Blacks, Blues, Caviar, RE, external USBs like the easystore models, even recycled WD from thrown away Laptops and prebuilts. So far, I have never had one issue with WD, I have run WDs hard for a normal consumer from Raid play, linux, DOS and windows install, even os2 warp long ago, PARing, unarchiving during height of Newsgroups. Obviously, I would buy again and recommend!!!! Only change I would make, if possible, by engineering without performance lose is drive noise. Perhaps, the SSD world has me spoiled or lighter case builds and silent cooling has me ... MoreI would recommend this product to anyone, I have used WD brand since the IDE days over 30 years ago seldom straying the WD path. In those decades I have personally used IDE, EIDE, SATA, Velociraptors, Greens, Blacks, Blues, Caviar, RE, external USBs like the easystore models, even recycled WD from thrown away Laptops and prebuilts. So far, I have never had one issue with WD, I have run WDs hard for a normal consumer from Raid play, linux, DOS and windows install, even os2 warp long ago, PARing, unarchiving during height of Newsgroups. Obviously, I would buy again and recommend!!!! Only change I would make, if possible, by engineering without performance lose is drive noise. Perhaps, the SSD world has me spoiled or lighter case builds and silent cooling has me spoiled but seems like the loudest drive I have ever had it lets you know your are accessing it??? 8tb of storage with large cache is great, I would have said the era of big hard drives is over, but within years of me thinking this , The era of huge game downloads/installs and wanting always ready your owned games faster large storage is still a thing, with games being upwards to 100 GB, and affordable SSDs at this time still only being 2tb steam back catalogs amass fast ;-) and with 4k and larger textures games are only going to get more commonly near or greater than 100GB.

So my son who is an avid PC gamer. His PC prior to this purchase had a 1TB Intel 660P NVME drive for OS and apps/games and a 1TB WD Blue mechanical drive. Of course, he also installed games on the WD Blue drive and is always out of space. He wanted something with more storage and I cautiously recommended the WD Black 6TB drive base don name, hopefully quality and reliability associated with the WD brand and of course the performance that WD Black implies. Pricing wise, not sure if I got a good deal or not. I suspect these drives are drying up because I do not believe they are actively being manufactured anymore. All that being said, installation was straightforward. Was proud of myself for cloning the 1TB mechanical WD Blue drive to the WD Black and then using tools ... MoreSo my son who is an avid PC gamer. His PC prior to this purchase had a 1TB Intel 660P NVME drive for OS and apps/games and a 1TB WD Blue mechanical drive. Of course, he also installed games on the WD Blue drive and is always out of space. He wanted something with more storage and I cautiously recommended the WD Black 6TB drive base don name, hopefully quality and reliability associated with the WD brand and of course the performance that WD Black implies. Pricing wise, not sure if I got a good deal or not. I suspect these drives are drying up because I do not believe they are actively being manufactured anymore. All that being said, installation was straightforward. Was proud of myself for cloning the 1TB mechanical WD Blue drive to the WD Black and then using tools to convert the cloned image from MBR to GPT once it was laid back down on the Black drive and expand the partition to the full 5.35GB readable by Windows. After all said and done, everything just worked and all the game installs and other things on the new Black drive worked without incident. This drive does make a bit more "noise" than the Blue it replaced. I assume there are more platters in it and that they may be at a different spindle speed than the Blue drive it replaced. Anyway, drive noise just makes me nervous. Other reviews indicate that this drive runs warmer than other drives and while I cannot say one way or the other, I do worry about temperatures overall in the PC it is installed in. Paranoia aside that a spindle drive is doomed to fail out of the box, performance wise this drive does seem to perform well. Games that were installed on it, do launch quicker than when they were on the Blue. Another interesting observation. We are fortunate to have 1Gb FIOS internet. When downloading and installing games from Steam onto the Intel 660p, it doesn't take long for the write cache of the Intel 660p to saturate and write speeds drop to a crawl. However, when downloading games from Steam to the WD Black, the write speeds while downloading large games seems to be more consistent and maintain a higher median level. I suspect the write cache in the Black is larger and maybe managed better than the Intel 660p even though it is an NVME. Of course reviews for Intel 660p do suggest that it really does suffer when its write cache is saturated. Overall, my son is very happy with this drive. As long as it lasts and gives him good service, I am cautiously optimistic. I really do think that we need to get good quality consumer grade SSD/NVME drives at mechanical HDD prices if we want to drive PC storage forward. I would have loved to purchase a 2.5" form factor SSD of the same size but prices are just too high once you get beyond 2TB.

I was very happy when the new WD BLACK 6TB HDD was delivered to my house ahead of the promised date.But after I spent 2 hours desperately trying to initialize it or otherwise format it using various tools, including WD toolset, I became very disappointed.Some tools reported me internal HDD error and some tools do not see this drive connected to begin with. Which is basically the same. Drive came to me damaged.