WD Black FZEX 1TB review

The silent update to WD Black

Being sick of slow loading time on Battlefield4 and some other competitive gaming i'm playing right now, I decided to upgrade my work drive from ancient 640Gb WD BLUE to this spanking new WD Black Series. As you know, time have moved ahead and the smallest capacity available is now 1TB.

As a recap, my system uses a SSD for OS, WD Green for storage and the WD Black replacing the previous work drive. FZEX replaces FAEX, offering higher performance using better caching resources and algorithm.

Other benchmarking sites show the new WD black with performance very close to Velociraptor. However, average access latency still loses out due to Velociraptor's spinning speed. If you put price into perspective, 1TB WD black is close to 1/3 the price of a Velociraptor, the performance/dollar is really insane.

Work drive replacement do not require cloning, a simple cltr A with hidden files shown will suffice. However, remember to turn off the paging file on your old work drive else it will BSOD on boot up. Also remember to rename the new drive with the same letter as the old drive once the old is unplugged. And viola, migration complete.

In addition to looking good on benchmark, there's significant real life performance improvement as well, since the paging is put on my work drive. Instead of a 1 second boot up after leaving bios, its now instant. You can briefly sees the blue windows logo flash pass, but its so fast that the loading circle didn't even appear at all!

Other noticeable improvement is faster loading time of applications. I have a comprehensive excel sheet to track my expenditure and investment, the file is stored on WD green while excel is installed on WD black. The previous loading time is consistently above 10 seconds, but now its below 5 seconds!

Battlefield 4 loading time is cut significantly of more than half as well but due to the random loading nature of the game, I do not have an accurate timing of the improvements. A general guide would be that previously, most of the vehicles are gone by the time I load into the game, but now, I'm 1 of the first few to load in with more variety of vehicles to choose from.

From budget hunters like me that are not willing to put down huge amount of money for a SSD that can be used as a main drive exclusively, SSD + the new WD black is an extremely affordable and high performance setup. The price is similar to the old WD black so do avoid the FAEX series. Compared to the WD blue, I personally feel that the performance improvement more than justify the 40% price increase.

I myself compiled the performance of all my drive as shown below, using AIDA64 v4.2:

SSD (OS Drive)



WD Black (Work drive)



WD Green (Storage)