WD 4TB My Book Desktop External Hard Drive - USB 3.0 - WDBFJK0040HBK-NESN,Black

$115 for a USB 3.0 4TB drive that is well made, sleek, and comes with everything you need. While it is a green drive (cheapest they make), its decently fast (USB 3.0) so that you can fill it (4tb) reasonably fast. Dont expect this to be a performance thing. This is just mass storage for archiving, or large media files. Dont get this for every day small file use. You get this to store large files. USB 3.0 works great. I get sustained 70MBps transfers with it on my setup on large 1Gb files, so I was able to transfer 2Tb at a reasonable time frame to a portable, external drive. On USB2.0 this would have taken days (literally two days). USB3.0 makes it fast enough to be functional. It would be nice if they used Red/Black/Blue drives instead of Green. But you have to consider its $115. I opted to go this route instead of a self-enclosure and a good Red or Seagate NAS drive, because my experience so far with self-enclosures is that they sometimes cause issues and if you lose index on the drive, the data is toast, unless you pay for recovery or get software to do it yourself. Either way, tedious and costly. I like it to just work. I use double backups, so this drive is serving as a massive backup of another backup of large files that I keep (videos).

I just needed to expand the memory on my

The WD My Book 3 TB is a fast and capable storage solution for backups, archive files, and other data. I plan to use it to store my Adobe LightRoom archives and working copies. Western Digital is, by common agreement, the most reliable and powerful brand of hard drive on the market to day, and this device continues their tradition of delivering the best. Although Im giving a rating of five stars, Id like to point out a limitation of this drive thats due to operating systems rather than the drive itself. If you plan to use this drive only with Windows, then you can allocate all 3 TB as a single primary partition. If, however, you want to be able to use the drive with Windows and with OS X, then youll have to use 2 partitions. The reason is that the Windows NTFS file system supports 3 TB partitions, but the multi-platform exFAT file system that works with both Windows and OS X only supports 2 TB. If you use exFat to use the drive with both OSes, then youll have to split the drive into two partitions. You do have the choice of making the two partitions equal sizes.

Ive had this for only a few days however I bought it with the intention of using it for external storage for my xbox one. I immediately move all of my games from my xbox internal hard drive to the external 4TB drive. Btw you will only have about 3.6 terabytes available after formatting and the drive can only be used for xbox one consoles. I did my due diligence and researched what would be the best drive for my application. My requirements were: Usb 3.0 External power source (for the HDD) 7200 RPM 4 TB (I plan on purchasing 35 to 50 games in the next year) Pros: *The games load about 8-15 secs faster than the internal hdd (this is really important to me) *It only took me approx 15 mins to move 22 games from the internal drive to the external drive *Its true plug n play. The Xbox One will immediately recognize it and ask you to format it. Also itll ask if you want to make the new drive the default for installs (when its connected). Cons: *None so far! *Some people complain about it being loud or the light, but mine sits behind my TV so I never hear it and the light creates a faint ambient white glow behind my TV but if you dont like it just put a piece of electrical tape over it.

Instructions virtually non-existent. It loaded on my laptop automatically when I plugged it into the usb port. I had to look in the G drive to even find the online manual. Needed to add Asian fonts to Adobe reader just to page thru contents. Had problems because it was not compatible with Windows 10 as loaded and I kept getting errors from my laptop saying the last device added is malfunctioning. I would unplug MY Book from the wall and re-plug it to get it to work but it was intermittent. Sometimes I could see the G drive and files in it but when I clicked on a file it would say file not found. The second day I signed on and I got a message on my laptop saying that it found an update for My Book so I downloaded and applied the update. After that it started working correctly and it even referred to Windows 10 in the updated manual. If you have Windows 10 make sure your version of software supports it. If not look to update. Also in your G drive you will find executables to load WD smartware and WD utilities to your PC. LOAD these to help you update and monitor the software. They tell you NOTHING!! in the box about loading anything. All I got was three drawings. First a picture of a hand plugging the hard drive into the wall. Second a pic of a hand plugging the usb cable into a port on your computer. Finally a pic of a window popping up on your computer directing the installation, This window never came up on my PC as it ran automatically and disappeared.

Excellent service. Very pleased.

This drive is big enough to backup all of my media files multiple times, meaning that I get six to twelve months of backup history and it seems to work well. I tried some 4 TB drives from other manufacturers but they cant be formatted in a way that is compatible with Windows Backup, which made them useless for me. Thats a limitation of Windows Backup but still, Im pleased that WD offers a way to make their drives compatible. You do have to reformat the drive before it will work with Windows Backup. It should work with other software out of the box. This article explains some of the steps involved in getting WD drives to work with Windows Backup. [...] We do have a problem if we reboot our desktop computer while the WD drive is plugged in -- the machine hangs during the BIOS initialization. We have to unplug the drive, start the computer, and then plug it back in. I dont know if this is a problem with the BIOS in my five-year-old DELL or if this is a problem with the drive.

Ive had good experiences with portable WD HDs before, so I picked this up mostly to save disk images of the computers in my house. This drive comes with software loaded on it for you to install: a utility to test and diagnose the drive, as well as a back up software solution; there is also a driver for this drive, but Im not clear what it is suppose to accomplish since Windows recognized the My Books full capacity without it. The utility is useful, but I didnt use the back up software -- rather I downloaded the Acronis True Image WD Edition software from WDs website. In fact, I installed Acronis, created a bootable Acronis disc, then uninstalled Acronis. I made an ISO copy of the bootable Acronis disc backup software. Acronis WD edition only works with WD drives attached to your computer. To test this portable drive I did a full erase filling the disc with zeroes (I used the Acronis bootable disc for this). What this accomplishes is that if there is a problem the software will tell me, and any defects will be replaced by good sectors through the SMART function of the drive. This took about a day and a half. I then tried to format the drive in Windows, I could not. Windows saw the My Book as two 2TB discs -- kind of strange. (Could a RAID 0 of two 2TB discs be inside what appears to be a single HDD?) Anyway, I zeroed the drive again using the supplied Windows WD utility and it only took a moment. That reset the drive so that it was viewed as one, blank 4TB drive in Windows. I then formatted the drive as NTFS with Windows. That took about a day and a half. So, there doesnt seem to be any defects. The drive works like regular drives, no funny business, and the drive is backward compatible with USB 2.0. This is a very solid and sturdy piece of equipment. Now, WD is known to supply back doors to the NSA. Im suspicious by nature, but dont have delusions of grandeur so as to think the NSA actually wants to spy on me. I wonder why my firewall is telling me the WD utility is trying to call out several thousands times a day. (I have my firewall block this.) So my advice is to test the drive to your content offline if youre using the WD software and only use WD software when youre offline -- otherwise firewall block it or uninstall it. The Acronis bootable disc doesnt call home and is used offline.

This is not a difficult item to review. Its storage. I mean, to take one approach, what can I say about it that is special? Oh, I just love the formatting on sectors 16385 - 24576. They store my backups really well. I could read/write on those sectors for hours! Now that I got that out of the way, I CAN tell you that I ran diagnostics on the drive, and all tests were passed. The device is simple and intuitive to use. It comes with extra utility software that, honestly, I havent tried out, but for people who dont roll their own when it comes to backup schema, it was very good of Western Digital to include it. I am a bit disappointed that the driver DVD was not included, and that the utility software was pre-installed on the drive. This made for an interesting situation, because the driver was copied to it. So, I had a Catch-22 situation of a sort. My Windows Vista Ultimate OS couldnt mount the drive for absence of the driver, but the driver was on the disk, which I could not mount. Because the vendor and I tried to run down the problem, and concluded that there is no DVD that is shipped with the device, I fault WD for this, but not enough to take away from the five-star rating. I just went to the WD web site to resolve the problem. In fact, WD tech support was kind enough to not only identify the correct URL for the driver, but they pointed me to their in-house diagnostic software, which was very useful. I commend my vendor as well - Gold Fever. They were timely, professional, and helpful in their communication with me as I tried to resolve the issues above, and I would purchase from them again if I had a choice.

I like this drive, but its definitely not a perfect solution for two reasons. First off, WD doesnt guarantee the model of HDD in their enclosures. The first time I ordered this drive I was sent a WD Green drive. This time round I got the cheaper WD Blue. Secondly, the drive works fine for the most part, but tends to be overly aggressive with the standby mode. Just a few moments of zero data traffic and the drive automatically stops revving. The drive takes a while to spool back up again so it can get a bit annoying. Otherwise, I have no major complaints since both drives still work perfectly well and I have had no issues since purchase. First drive was purchased close to a year ago. Id definitely buy this drive again. I have had no failed WD drives but enough Seagate ones to stay far away. WD however make terrible NAS Duo drives and mine was pretty much defective since day 1. WD would not do anything since it is out of warranty. If youre considering getting a NAS drive over this one, I recommend the single drive NAS or the plain and simple My Book.