Western Digital's New WD Black 4TB Hard Drive Lets You Keep ALL the Data

Western Digital updated its storage portfolio with a new 4TB model, promising to keep pace with digital hoarders' ever-growing collection of data. The new drives are part of WD's Black lineup, which is the hard drive maker's performance line - it's a curious change from previous drive launches that introduced new models with the Green logo, which is WD's power-saving/eco-friendly series of drives.

The company isn't the first to come out with a 4TB model; that honor belonged to Seagate as early as last fall. Earlier this year, in fact, Western Digital themselves showed off an enterprise-oriented 4TB drive, aimed at those companies that store massive amounts of data.

Still, this is the company's first consumer-oriented 4TB drive, and it's looking pretty great. The new drive spins at 7200RPM, and features a 64MB cache size to help buffer workloads.

WD didn't quote any benchmarks or disk speeds, but one benefit of creating larger-capacity hard drives is that the throughput is generally increased; it's a side effect of squeezing more data into the same physical space. 

To help keep up with the output of the new disks, the 4TB WD Black actually features a dual-processor setup to help manage data flow and dual actuators to help improve the accuracy of the drive's read heads. While you're not going to be seeing the low latencies you might get from a solid state drive (SSD), most users will be more than happy with the the drive's actual data-shifting abilities. 

Not to mention the fact that a 4TB SSD would be priced a few orders of magnitude higher than WD's new 4TB WD Black. You'll be able to pick this bad boy up for $339, a little higher than new capacities have been introduced in the past. The drives are available now, and come with a 5-year limited manufacturer's warranty.