Western Digital 4TB My Book Desktop External Hard Drive, USB 3.0, External HDD with Password Protection and Backup Software - WDBBGB0040HBK-NESN

I have to give this drive mad props. I've been a My Book fanatic for years. I have rarely if ever had a serious issue with any WD drive in almost 30 years. I just keep buying bigger and bigger ones and they just keep going. I buy new drives and back up everything from the older drives to the newer drives as they continue to get huger and huger in capacity, and as I record and capture more and more data. These My Book and Elements drives have been phenomenally reliable. I have the RAID pair versions, too. Love 'em all! So I'm pretty multiple-backed-up. But here's what I have to tell you about this one... I was house-sitting for a good friend over the 4'd o' Jeely holiday this year. They have an old Weimaraner whose getting up in years, so she's not much trouble, but last Christmas they got a new maltipoo who is CONSTANTLY all over that poor old dog with her ridiculous puppy energy! As usual, I set up my headquarters with my work laptop (much newer and way more powerful than my home laptop) at their dining room table with the power cables for both the computer and the hard drive running over to the wall. It's never been a problem before. Early on in the week, I had an inkling that I might not want to have the power cables hanging off the table like that this time, but I didn't do anything about it right away. Well, the next day in the early evening, I was standing near the table. There was a sudden rustling and the dogs tore between the table and the wall, and I heard a loud, reverberant CRAAAASH!!!! It took a couple seconds for the sound to completely die away in their large, open house. I immediately knew what it was. Sure enough, as I looked at the hardwood floor, it was indeed my hard drive that had slammed against it. I was so P.OOOOOOO.d!! I've had the drive since February, and there was almost 6 Terabytes of data on it, which, as you probably know, represents a significant time investment just in getting that data on there, to say nothing of what was involved in actually collecting and producing said data! But as it is an external USB drive, I knew it was spun down since I hadn't been at the computer for a while, and I fully expected the drive to be functional when I plugged it in. I've dropped drives before. Especially inside a plastic case, not spinning, they can take a VERY HARD drop and still work flawlessly for years. I've done it before. Well, imagine my horror when I didn't even get a drive letter when I plugged it back in! This detail becomes important later. It spun up and made its little chipmunk noises and sounded normal, but it made somewhat of a funny short squeal whenever I torqued it a bit, so I thought some severe damage must have occurred! My heart sank a bit, but I wasn't TOO mortified, because I still had this drive's primary at home. This drive was used as a backup, and it's also the one I take out in the world when I want to have my personal data with me, wrapped securely inside my clothes in a suitcase, or in the backpack I wear as a kind of digital Go Bag that I take to work every day. It was nearing 11 p.m. as I somewhat nervously made my way home about 15 minutes away to pick up the primary. I started thinking about what could go wrong. I could have a car accident. ANYTHING. This pair of drives basically contains the last two years of everything I've recorded (I'm a sound guy and I play the sitar live, sing in my church choir and basically record my entire life, as well as events of friends and others, LITERALLY almost 24/7), all my photos (I'm a photographer and take thousands of photos per month), a videographer, with hours of footage casually captured, and sometimes not-so-casually, and many other collections of data from all over my life. I am a VERY data-intensive person and have been for most of my sentient existence. I'm also a programmer. I've been backing up for a few decades. I have a suitcase full of old hard drives that must weigh at least 100 pounds. Yeah, I don't have a third geographic redundancy for all my data, and I'd be pretty screwed if my house burned down, but hey... I am easily WAY more backed up than 99.999% of people in the world. So as I came home to get the main drive, my biggest worry was just getting it backed up again before something else could happen. I decided to do the backup, using the work laptop, to a new 8 TB My Book drive, which I had already had one-hour rushed to me at my friend's house via Amazon PrimeNow. (I LOVE that service!!!!) This is because the work laptop has USB 3 ports and the copy would go MUCH faster than on my home laptop, the venerable old Qosmio that I've had since 2010. Yep... it's still going strong and I still love it. But sadly, it only has USB 2 ports (until I recently added a PCMCIA USB 3 adapter which you can read about in another of my reviews... yes, I said PCMCIA!!!). I got home and picked up the 6 TB (ALSO WD My Book) hard drive for which the 8 TB drive was the backup. Here's where I will shamefully admit that I have a LOT of stuff on that drive that I never even copied over to the new 8 TB drive, just because I never did, I guess out of sheer laziness. Even when you're slightly paranoid like me, you can get complacent when things just work and work and work for years. So I was a little nervous about all this. I toyed around in my mind with thoughts like "What if I plug it in and it just doesn't work?". NAAAAAAAH! What are the odds? I was just using it the day before. And I've even used it on that work laptop before. Everything's going to be fine! Well, wouldn't you know... I got back to the friend's house with that drive and plugged it into the laptop, and a popup dialog came up with some weird drive letter saying it needed to be formatted to be used!!!!! I almost lost it!!! I brought up the Disk Management app and it looked like it had 3 RAW partitions on it instead of the single 6 TB properly-formatted one that should have been there! Something somewhere had gone VERY wrong!!! To this day, I don't know what happened to that drive. I started asking myself why I didn't simply do the smart thing and fire it up at home and just do the backup there, slowly and safely. But I knew I was stuck at this remote location for a week and would want to babysit the whole process, so that's what drove my decision. This may sound ridiculous to most people, but this situation threw me into a serious existential dilemma. I have spent my entire life capturing recordings of sound, video, photography, EVERYTHING. I'm 51 now. I've been at it for decades. I was facing the possibility of just having lost all my recordings of my church choir for the past two years... all my live sitar performances... two years of amazing photographs from all aspects of my life and places I've been and experiences I've had and people I know and those whom I have randomly met and photographed. Two years of that 24/7 recording of my life I mentioned before. Yes, I literally carry a Sony stereo sound recorder with me everywhere I go and it records my entire life! In that space and time, I started questioning what was the point of my entire life if it was this easy to lose so much data that I had spent so much time and effort capturing and preserving and supposedly backing up. I am fortunate in that I have lived as a somewhat social hermit for most of my life. Even when I was married for seven years (1995-2002), people accused us of just being TWO hermits living together. I like to be alone. There's only so much of being around other people that I can take before I have to retreat back to my fortress of solitude. But that can be very lonely, too. And that's why I love capturing life in so many ways, because I am alone enough that I am amazed to see people and nature and life and the world around me. I feel compelled to record it. Then I can study it and re-live it in microscopic detail when I am alone... a kind of detail that most people don't even know exists. In the past few years, I have returned to a life with faithful Believers around me, after 35 years of having walked away from my faith in God and Christ. Jim, the husband of my church choir director, is a data recovery specialist. (Holy Spirit at work here, right?) I called him and told him my dilemma. I drove the new 8 TB drive and the 6 TB drive over to him. I talked to him and his wife, my great brother and sister, about what if I don't get this data back? I've been having crazy thoughts about why I even do all this? Should I go off and become a monk? Should I pour myself into the sitar and just forget about recording things ever again? Should I call up the girl I've been madly in love with for over two years, who is unable to even fathom a desire for an intimate relationship (think of a female version of Sheldon Cooper from Big Bang Theory) and just propose to her? Did I even want to continue to live??? I was in a crazy kind of way!!!! So Jim tells me not to worry and that he'd look at it. Sometime the next day, he was able to call me up and tell me that all the data was still there, and that he was copying it to the new drive. Incidentally, he only has USB 2 ports on his recovery machine, so it was a several day process!!!! I razzed him about that a bit. But you know... he got all the data off that drive and onto the new one... the new WD My Book 8 TB drive, the PrimeNow page of which I think I'll also post this review to so it will be backed up!! :-) He couldn't figure out why he wasn't able to fix the partition table, even though his software recognized it as a single NTFS partition and was able to fully recover the data without any hiccups. It's still sitting on the floor of my room here. I don't dare reformat it and recopy the data to it until I have fully backed up the data from the new 8 TB drive to yet another drive. (Yes, here I am weeks later and I am just now starting that process! Hence I still have the 6 TB acting as a KIND of backup for now.) So, I mentioned backing this stuff up to yet another drive. "And what drive might that be?" you ask. Why, the OTHER 8 TB WD My Book drive that got slammed on the floor! That's the reason for this huge 5-star review. Remember I mentioned that when I plugged it in I didn't even get a drive letter? That really struck me as strange, because the drive letter usually still shows up, even if the drive is completely trashed. It will simply give you a bunch of errors and data failures when you try to access it. It really seemed more like an interface issue than a hard drive issue. Having nothing better to do while I waited for my data to come back, I had disassembled the 8 TB drive from its plastic case, thinking maybe there was some issue with the circuit board that connects the drive and its SATA interface to the outside world with a USB interface. I disconnected the little board and re-seated it to the drive and jiggled the plug in the connector, all to no avail. The drive still didn't come up on the computer. So several days later, the day I was done house-sitting, Jim announced the copy was finished. I picked up the drives. When I finally got home, I plugged the new 8 TB into my laptop and it came up and there was all my data, as promised. What a relief! Next, I took the dropped drive completely out of its enclosure, still not convinced that it was dead. I mean, even the brand new 8 TB drive that I had just bought made that funny little squeal when I torqued it a little bit while it was spinning, so it was a completely normal sound! When you own a ton of drives like I do, you have a lot of bare ones that came out of tower computers, or even some that were taken out of external drive enclosures. They are much easier to manage that way, and take up a lot less space. But you have to have a way to access them, and one way via a hard drive bay. That's a device that lets you plug a bare hard drive into a slot and it interfaces to your computer via USB or maybe eSATA. Well, I halfheartedly plugged the drive into the bay and turned it on, and what do you know... good old Drive P: came right up on the computer as if nothing had ever happened! It's still going like gangbusters. 5-stars, my friend! I lost NOTHING during this calamity. Yeah, I have to admit, I even had a bunch of stuff on this drive that wasn't backed up anywhere else, too. But I consider a lot of that to be expendable because it's more of a time investment than a life investment. It's stuff that can be retrieved again from elsewhere. The moral of this story is this... and I know this full well, of course, as do a great many of you... BUT... ONE BACKUP of important data is NEVER enough! Think about it. If you lose your backup, or your primary for that matter, then you are down to ONE COPY. And if something... ANYTHING... goes wrong with that... you are in the same boat as all those people you have shaken your head about over the years who didn't even bother to have ONE backup and lost everything. The only real backup is AT LEAST TWO backups, and one of those is tucked away in a safe, remote location. That way, your house can burn down and you still don't lose anything, except for the stuff you created since you last updated your remote backup, which you have to do from time to time, of course, preferably not in the presence of the third drive, since you don't want all three of them to be together at the same time. You never knew when disaster will strike, right? Look what almost happened to me!!! This is just a silly review of a hard drive on Amazon, but these drives contain years' worth of the very product of my life. And I am here to tell you that I trust them and I count on them and they have not let me down, even when under extreme duress. What more do you need to know? A quick postscript here... before I went to get my drives back, Jim had asked me to grab some dinner for three at a local Italian restaurant as payment for this service (he usually charges people $500 for this kind of recovery!). His wife had had a foot surgery recently and they were depending on friends to bring them meals for a time. When I got there, they had set up their formal dining room with their best china and a bottle of white wine. We ate like royalty that evening. That's the power of friends and the power of faith!

I had been put off WD drives since my old (WD Elements desktop drive) had just one day (in 2014 sometime after about an year or so of reliable usage) become dead without any known reason (no physical damage ever, never moved from desktop) and I hadn't been able to recover any of my 3tb data (years of work). This experience obviously caused me an aversion for WD drives but I learnt to always have a total backup of my main drive/data and for the last 4 or so years I have been using a 10tb Seagate (desktop hub) with 02 5tb desktop Seagates as the total backups. Evidently I do my backups manually (it's not rocket science requiring clunky software, rather a sequential style drag/drop/copy/paste task) and while it is admittedly a mundane and repetitive exercise the minor PTSD like experience from my first WD experience mentioned in the first sentence will not allow me to rely on anything else to ensure data storage safety (my data isn't secret or even valuable, just digital memories, movies, tv shows and pc games/software etc...but important to me because I like to be a library of sorts where I dislike deleting things to free up space because offline data access is always a good thing if ever faced with connectivity issues). Am not a techie but I appreciate data safety and after about 7 or 8 weeks of research (online duh..que Billie's bad guy) I decided to part ways with some of my hard earned savings and dive back into the promises by Western Digital. It's not cheap (I live in beautiful Fiji) to buy things on Amazon as shipping/import costs add on to the overall purchase price (while our FJ dollar is relatively an underdog vis-a-vis the US dollar) so took the plunge (despite my earlier 10tb Seagate first arriving DOA, costing my an extra FJ$200 to ship it back for a "free" replacement...not free to the consumer but Seagate is worth it IMHO). This one cost me US$905.83 (so you can understand that in FJ$ it translates to FJ$1,830 or thereabouts, but under FJ$2K factoring in credit card charges as well). No am not rich, but needed another drive as my 10tb main has about 700gb free space left (since I don't delete anything). First of all, delivery and packaging - very nice (vocalize like Borat but am sincere). Amazon had those air space bags in the outer box so that was nice and the DHL service is very nice and reliable so got this drive today (2 weeks earlier than expected). Then the big test...was it DOA...nope, works well and straight out of the box as it should and drive passed the WD diagnostic tests (using the RAID 0 default). Contains 02 10tb WD Red drives which are nice. Casing is relatively okay, plastic but should be fine (it is a desktop drive after all and will remain on the desktop). Usable space is 18.1 TB (this is expected/normal for anyone who knows basic computing). Cables are nice with USB C to USB 3 and USB C to USB C with power adapter and cable. Have transferred about 100gb of data to the WD MyBook Duo from my 10tb Seagate and speeds, while not consistent (given large volumes of small files pdf, doc, ppt, xls etc) are relatively fast (using USB C to USB C but obviously other/host drive is USB 3). The MyBook Duo runs relatively quietly (no audible irritation) and there are obvious decibel increases when the drive is under stress but this is not an issue if you understand how mechanical hard drives work. While this review is arguably premature I am happy with my purchase for now and I have placed my trust in WD products again because my research shows that while its products may face issues at times, it appears WD cares about the consumers. I remain on my guard however because now my main 10tb, together with my 02 05tb Seagates (total 20tb) will be the data backup of this 20tb WD. Would I buy this again? That depends on how well this one lasts (and honestly, it should last my remaining lifetime given my usage habits but lets see, if it doesn't last, nope if it does, yes, because I don't delete anything and more storage is often a need for me). So for this product, for now, 03 out of 03 for the product itself and 02 out of 02 for the Amazon service and DHL delivery. Vinaka from Fiji.

I'm writing this review for the rest of us common-folk who might be using external storage for the first time since it's annoying seeing either lazy users or ones whose knowledge may as well be written in Cuneiform (but at least the super techy ones are useful for like-minded users, just not for me; the lazy are just useless period). I've had the 4TB model of this product since 2017, and after I did some general hardware research, I learned that it's wise to replace any external hard drive after 3-4 years since even the best can experience errors, and thus got this 6TB model on May 15, 2020. It seems odd for external drives to have a shorter lifespan considering that my 2013 iMac managed to keep its stored data safe for 7+ years now, but eh, that's an entire computer. Plus, the government steals more of my money through useless car-tag renewals every year, so paying for something every few years that helps preserve my memories and data is worthwhile. It was a bit unnerving to see a mix of good and bad reviews here, but then the other brands had those, too, so unfortunately it does appear to be a gamble with Dead-on-Arrivals (DOAs). The box this model came in did have a dent on one of the corners, which I recorded in case this thing does a peace-out on me way too early, so just be wary of how your package arrives because we all know that delivery companies aren't foolproof, and all hardware still maintains some level of fragility. Just like the 4TB model, this 6TB model came ready-to-go with an exFAT file system (I don't rightly know the difference between file systems other than compatibility). I didn't bother utilizing the two resources that are stored on the drive (one to set up for Windows and one for Mac). I imagine that those who cannot use this between macOS and Windows is because they formatted it specifically for the macOS file system, and you'd lose your data if you were to re-format it. I'm on Windows 10, but I was on macOS Mojave for the 4TB one before also using it on Windows; I've not yet used this 6TB model on Mac, though I'd be surprised if suddenly it's an issue. I also don't use the encryption feature. I don't know why some say it's the default because it's not present on this or the 4TB one; you may need to use the appropriate, aforementioned resources to activate it. Still, I don't like the encryption because ... well it just doesn't seem worthwhile with the potential issues it can cause. Honestly, if you have truly sensitive info, print or record the info physically and keep it locked away, old-school style, and that's coming from a 25 year-old y'all; that's the best security you'll ever get in modernity. The Sleep Mode can be an oof. Annoying at best for me since I'm using this drive purely for backups, so having to wait a few moments to access files isn't the biggest deal for me. Understandably, I've seen gamers plagued more heavily by the Sleep Mode; for them, I'd recommend getting an external drive without its own power source and just with the USB connection. Now, the data-transfer/writing-speed for this (and the 4TB) model can vary. When transferring larger files (1GB or more), it averaged at 150 MB/s. When transferring smaller files, especially ones that were under a few MBs, then I'm guessing it's around 60-80 files per second (it would display in KB/s at this point), so it takes individual sizes/file types into account (which is fine for me since I want it to be transferring my large-sized video files at its maximum writing speed). My computer is pretty solid, but not a beast; I also just quit-out all background apps that I can (even disconnecting my WiFi) to help the computer focus just on the transfer since I had around 3.5 TBs to transfer and it still took a few hours. I personally did it main-folder-by-main-folder as opposed to all-at-once, but the largest folder was 1.2 TBs and it took a little over an hour, so I guess you can think of this drive as 1TB/hr. It's intended physical orientation is vertical, not horizontal, otherwise it may heat up more easily; the rubber-soles at the base tell you that it should be kept that way. It has its own power source that requires an available outlet, you can't just connect the USB and begin using it. If you ever need to move it to another computer or a far-enough location, eject the drive from your computer first. On Mac, right-click on the drive's icon and select "Eject" or eject it from Finder. On Windows 10, there should be an icon in the "Show hidden Icons" category (upward-arrow symbol next to the Internet, Volume and Time in the lower-left corner) that says "Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media" and select the appropriate drive. Once the drive's ejected, disconnect the USB from the computer, wait for a few moments (usually when it stops singing the song of its people), then unplug the power cord and gently move it over yonder. Then, plug the power source back in, then the USB to begin using again. During its usage, leave it alone, keep it cool and clean (I'd cover it up whenever I'd vacuum/dust so that it wouldn't dirty the interior as much) and away from other mayhem. It's essentially your digital baby. I'm hopeful that this thing lasts for the same 3-4 years as the 4TB did; if not, I'll update the review here. I'm certainly gonna baby this thing a lot more than I did the poor 4TB one since I did experience some data loss as a result of dropping it 3-feet down onto carpet (the USB was detached in the process and thus wasn't ejected properly), but I was able to get R-Studio's data recovery software and recover most of what I wanted (mainly a few dozen video files, all else remained intact). C'est la vie, that data loss was just an accident.

Don't listen to the negative reviews. I read through most of them & just about all of them are due to user error. I'm an experienced technologist with over three decades experience & no I don't work for WD. I own over five external WD drives for mission critical backups ect .. I've only had one external drive fail me due to a bad power supply after 2 years or so. A simple power supply replacement resolve the issue immediately. It could be that the reviews are from competitors or people whom purchased a drive from untrustworthy sellers selling refurbished or used goods as new. Who knows .. ?? From my experience, Western Digital manufactures some of the most reliable drives available. Others not so much but I'll leave it at a that. There is a saying "The cheap comes out costly at the end." The only reviews which may be accurate are the ones talking about the drive not showing up after it was working perfectly for some time. This is most likely due to a faulty power supply & for $10.00 to $15.00 you can get a replacement power cable on EBAY & get up and running again. I would first check the drive with compatible USB ports & or other systems to make sure it's not the USB port or the USB cable causing the issue. I tried helping someone here & my comment was reported & censored because the individual most likely felt offended by their lack of knowledge. Instead of owning up to their stupidity they had my comment removed which contain no personal attacks. I simply suggested to try a new power supply. In any case, here are additional reasons why the drive may appear to go bad or actually go bad & destroy your files. 1. A Windows update may cause the external drive letter to be re-assigned so when you connect the external drive it doesn't show up because the drive letter needs to be re-assigned so it shows up again. Same thing can happen if you add a new internal drive or turn on additional external drive. 2. If you are working with files within different platforms utilizing various file systems ( FAT32, NTFS, EXT3, EXT4 ect .. ) & you attempt to backup files to a hard drive with a different file system it can cause the files to become corrupt or destroy the drives file system table responsible for maintaining a reference to all files saved to that drive. This is something that often happens when attempting to save files extracted within a Linux EXT4 that were not meant to be housed on an NTFS formatted drive. Some files are not suppose to be moved into a different file systems because they are meant specifically for the file system they were extracted or programmed for. 3. The way your files / directories are named contain too many characters or the files / directories you are moving contain too many sub directories which can cause file transfer issues. Try to shorten the names & the sub directory count. If you can't, it's best to use a file compression utility like 7zip or Winzip in order to compress the files / directories before moving them to a backup drive ect .. 4. Your system files may have malware of some kind. It's not uncommon for the average person to simply attempt file transfers to a new partition and or drive without first running a malware / spyware scan on their system for potential issues. This can cause abnormal behavior like failed file transfers & self-destructing files. 5. You failed to format the drive with a reliable file system like NTFS. You should format a new hard drive regardless if it's ready to go out of the box or not. Backup any utilities the drive may contain by default & proceed with a drive format to ensure a fresh start.

So far, so good... About 3 months now. Using this with a MacBook for backup. No issues with installation, initial backup, etc. Using only Time Machine software. I'd bought a Lacie at first, knowing the great reputation. It died bigly and quickly, and no way to get a refund or support. Tried, finally gave up (and Lacie stopped making that drive. Bad taste!) So, I find this drive more basic, no 'bells & whistles' like Lacie, but then, no bright flashing blue light either. OK, gone. This drive does not have any light to signal when it's backing, or connected. No on/off switch. Basic. But then I read many reviews about its long-term reliability and performance, and that's clearly #1 priority. Several months in, plugging it in daily or when I return from travel, and it does its thing. Not always super quickly to start of eject, but I'm ok with it being a bit of a brick, as long as it keeps working. It's quiet (to my ears), definitely hear it moving and humming when it's backing, and if it's left plugged in it will dutifully back once an hour (per Apple Tahoe OS). Not much else to say - benchmarks, comparisons to others etc. It's covered, already. I would note that my one disappointment is that the interface is not native USB-c, and so I'm using a tiny Anker dongle. Again, so far so good, and I hope I join the many who say it just chugs along reliably, without problems, for a long time.

First, I would give this ZERO stars if I could. DO NOT ORDER an XTERNAL DRIVE from Amazon! It arrived in a plastic bag! No outer box to absorb shocks. I have used WD My Book Hard Drives for years for my Macs. From 2TB to 4TB. None have failed. I just needed more space. I did not like the look of the new version, and I especially did not like that this has no activity light. But I bought one, since my 4TB was maxed out. Let me begin with...I know to disable Time Machine while transfering and I know to shut off Sleep on my mac. It arrived and seemed to take forever to transfer the the old drive to the new. I have a MASSIVE itunes library, and I would watch the data amount slow and sometimes stop during the next day during transfer. Finally showed done, but nothing was showing in itunes. I called WD and someone had me run a few tests and he said the drive was no good, to return it. I had a hard time erasing all of the data before returning it, but I did get it done. So the replacement comes, and I go through the same thing, only this time, more trouble. Time Machine not syncing. I contact WD and I explain, and the person has me look at the format, which I had used THEIR enclosed directions for reformatting for Mac, and she said it needed to reformatted to Mac OS Extended, which is NOT what they tell you to do in the directions. I think it was EXFAT. Anyway... Oh, another disclaimer...I know the proper way to re-route all of my photo, music, etc to the external. Like I said, I've done this several times in the past. So I reformat to Mac OS Extended and Time Machine starts to back up. However, drive is making noise. None of my old ones did. All of a sudden, songs that were showing in my itunes now could not access files and I start to manually examine the folders on the drive and see the songs in there. But they are not playable in the program. So I drag some files into itunes proper and it recopies new ones. Then today, the old ones, which I had deleted after dragging new ones in, showed again, but as unplayable. THEN, I see that WD says WRITE ONLY to the HD. I call someone. He says don't worry about what it says. He then gives me the software link to run a diagnostic test. I say goodbye. First test, 1 minute, says OK. Second test says Quick Drive Test-should be done in 2 minutes or less. By 2 minutes, it said 90% done and an hour later it never finished. I tried again and same results. I am returning this one, too, and I would not recommend the new version to anyone. I saw it got top pick in a PC review mag, but, not for me. I will try getting an Elements which is very similar to the old My Book, and see if that is any better. Hope this review helps someone make an informed decision.

I have an embarrassingly large number of backup drives. Part of it is as a commercial photographer it’s a necessity – at last count I have something approaching a quarter of a million photos in my lifetime file. The other reason is I’ve learned the hard way to back up all of my work, then back it up again, and then make sure to make another backup to take off premises for safety. This is my third WD MyBook. There’s no real reason this product exists, there are cheaper ways to get a backup drive and use it with a computer, but these are convenient, dependable and reasonably priced. I bought this one to do a mega consolidation of everything I have on many different media, except for my photography. WHAT I LIKE The form factor is simple, just a plastic monolith case that can be used either horizontal or vertical. I choose to use it vertical to take up a minimal amount of desk space. I like to keep it right there in front of me as a visual reminder to be sure to do a daily backup. IMPROVEMENTS WD seems to have this product line down pat, it’s old technology that has proven itself and there’s not a lot they can do to make it better. The most positive thing I can say about it is that they wisely don’t load it with a lot of useless bloatware to try to make it look more important to you. There are just two relatively small apps, one for PC and one for Mac for those who like to use backup software. Both files are easily deleted in seconds if you don’t want them. I choose not to use automated backup software, I simply copy entire files and folders from one drive to another so there’s no guessing where they are or what they’re named. OPINION I find it unfortunate that here we are deep into the twenty-first century and there are still reviews about how noisy or slow these drives are. Your’re not saying anything new by bringing that up, yes they are, if that bothers you don’t buy a hard drive with a spinning platter. There are those who will say, and count me in on that, mechanical hard drives continue to be used because they are the safest media we can use, the chances of recovering a corrupt or lost data file is highest with these than any other media. The method being used to use a moving recording head back and forth on a revolving disk is going to cause some noise and it’s also going to be a bit on the slow side. I find that the speed is only a factor when I first get a drive and I’m copying huge amounts of data to it, and yes that can take hours. After that most backups are cumulative and how long they take has never been an issue for me. And like I said, I keep my WD right in front of me on my desk and they’ve reduced the vibration and noise to the point that it is almost imperceptible. Because this product does exactly what I expect it to do and because of my positive experience with the MyBook product line I believe this earns a full five stars.

The drive is formatted to 12.79TB using ext4 on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Seems to run cool and extremely quiet. The only way I can tell it is working is by putting my fingers on top of it and feeling for vibrations. UPDATE 1a: OCT 26, 2020 The drive did get hot after months of use inside the original enclosure. It reached a temperature of 56C/132F. So that should be a concern. It runs 29C/84F inside the Synology 220J with active fan cooling. The room it was in was air-conditioned and no more than 75F ambient room temperature. Both drives are WDC WD140EDFZ-11A0VA0 14000.5GB Firmware 81.00A81 5400 RPM 512 MB Cache (HC530 are rated at 7200 RPM so these drives are throttled down to a lower RPM or at least one is - idk) HGST HC530 family drives with TDMR UPDATE 1b: OCT 26, 2020 I purchased a second 14TB, approximately four months later than my first one. I wanted a low-power solution to keeping movie files available for Plex and Amazon had a Prime Day sale on an entry-level Synology DS220J NAS. The two Nvidia Shield Pro 2019 will handle any heavy transcoding (if any) because the NAS is not designed with Plex transcoding in mind. My second drive came in a different color box too so I initially panicked. But after running CrystalDisk Info and Speedtest, I was relieved that both boxes had the same exact drive inside the hard plastic enclosure. So I hope this serves as a heads up for anyone shucking these drives too. Rest assured they are the same drives with the same exact firmware. The first was purchased in June of 2020, and the second in August 2020. Four months apart. Keep that in mind as we head into 2021 and later. I did get different benchmark tests but I am hoping that it was due to having four months of data (7 TB) on the original drive and perhaps CrystalDisk performed its benchmarks from vastly different cylinders on each drive. As you can see from the included screengrab, the model numbers are identical. The DS220J also reported the same under DSM 6.2. I will have them set up as SHR mirroring in the NAS. I wish I could have done the benchmark test with two clean drives but I would need a third 14TB drive which would make it a bit beyond my means at this moment. UPDATE 1c: OCT 27, 2020 (added one additional picture of Storage Manager, Synology's NAS app) I have both drives inside my Synology DS220j running Synology's parity consistency check for at least 30 hours non-stop. Both drives run significantly cooler on the Synology NAS than the WD plastic enclosures. In the WD plastic enclosure, they ran at 54-56c while on the NAS, they run 30c-33c. Average about 20 degrees hotter centigrade in the WD factory enclosure. I wonder if earlier failures I had with other WD USB drives in the past could be attributed to them running hotter than normal. Even if you don't need the advanced features of a NAS, I would recommend a lower-end less expensive model like the DS200j just to keep the drives running cooler and of course for its data redundancy protection. I will continue to update for at least one year. If the nas works out for me really well for the next twelve months, I'll upgrade to a four-bay unit to use some of the more advanced raid implementations. UPDATE: JUNE 16, 2022 Since my last update, I purchased two more additional drives and I have upgraded NAS from the DS220j to the Synology DS920+ (four-bay intel CPU model). The drives are configured in a Synology Raid setup which holds a shared data storage for five PCs and 4K 2160p Plex library. Two 2019 Nvidia Shield Pro streamers and two smart TVs stream movies and DVR newscasts from it. The DS920+ has reported 4722 Hrs (Powered on) and the drives remain year-around at 30C/86F. S.M.A.R.T reports zero errors across all four drives. The DS920+ is plugged into a UPS and it receives power reports from the UPS through its data connection. So far I have no problems with these WD14TB drives. I honestly feel it's just the lousy plastic enclosures that they come in that cause many problems due to overheating and possibly user error with usb/power cables. But once they are in an active cooled protected environment like a NAS, they are very reliable.