WD 20TB Elements Desktop External Hard Drive, USB 3.0 external hard drive for plug-and-play storage - WDBWLG0200HBK-NESN

It works seamlessly with my Mac.

Using it for computer backups, mostly.

This is still good storage drive and really not much to complain nor praise about for these storage drive. What I would love to know is the information mentioned by this user, LA in Dallas, mentioned in it review for 16tb external hard drive WD. One thing to mention: your computer may report the size of the disk as 14.5 TB. What that really means is that the drive capacity is 16 x 10^12 bytes, which corresponds to 14.5 x 2^40 bytes, sometimes written as 14.5 TiB. (One tibibyte, 1 TB, is 2^40 bytes.) Computers often work in powers of 2, which is why your computer may say the disk is 14.5 TB. - LA in Dallas There is not a lot of people who would go into details behind the TB number or how different it would look once connected and loaded onto the computer. I am certain those that looking for storage only look at the capacity or only come to know of the capacity and not the ins of TB and it different appearance. I would like WD and many other companies that make hard drive and external hard drive, and etc. to considered adding these information onto their product pages. Thank you.

I had an old 1TB WD My Book that was making clicking noises more frequently as well as failing to connect to my laptop consistently. To be fair, I bought it well over a decade...and had accidentally dropped it a few times throughout the years. Know that it was going to give up the ghost soon, I started looking for a replacement. Given I had a pretty good experience with the 1TB, I decided to go with another WD brand. I glad that I did. Set up was a breeze. I just had to plug in the power, connect the USB cable to the laptop, and that was it. At times, it does make audible clunking sounds reading/writing; however, I think thats part of the operation (and this clunking sound is different from the clicking sound my dying 1TB was making). The shell is pretty minimalist and straight forward in design. Its a nice piano black, so its a possible finger print magnet if that would be a concern of yours. Though these external drives are really meant to just sit on your desk/table and not be touched or moved around a lot. Now the problem lies with how am I going to fill up this drive? I think I bought myself too much space to know what to do with it, but this is a good problem to have!

My hard drive is still chugging along. It is a price and storage bs speed trade off. Great value for the size. Hard to compete with solid state but so much more value

16TB with14tb usable how do they keep getting away with false claims????

***Update - I now have three of these drives and they all clunk to one degree or another. The clunking is inconsistent and each of the drives are sometimes completely quiet, and each are sometimes very noisy, even when sitting idle. It is all very odd to me and, while the clunking is certainly annoying, I have come to the conclusion that this is just the nature of these WD 18 TB hard drives. ***End of Update This seems to be a solid drive although I have only had it three days. On day two I noticed a rather loud clunking sound that I initially thought was coming from outside. But tracking down the noise I determined that it is the 18 TB Hard Drive that clunks every couple of seconds whether in use or not. I can feel the clunk by placing my hand around the drive. Love the storage capacity and, hopefully, the noise isnt a sign of potential problems, especially since I have a second 18 TB drive on order which, when added to the first 18 TB drive, will allow me to retire my three smaller WD external hard drives that have been in use for nearly 10 years.

If your purpose of buying this drive is to Shuck(remove it from its enclosure to use as internal drive) I would recommend you do at least a s.m.a.r.t check with windows command line chkdsk while its still enclosed to see if it came bad out of the box because you will void warranty, so you cant send it back after you shuck it and find a bad drive in the enclosure. Both my 6TB and 8TB came with WD white label WDC WD80EDAZ models. Strangely enough my 6TB did not require the 3.3 volt pin mod in order to be recognized by windows but my 8TB did, I bought them about a couple month apart so who knows if they changed it. I also want to note that even after the 3.3 volt pin mod on my 8TB, it was still not showing up in windows. Showed up as a strange size in EaseUS partition manager but was hidden in Windows disk manager but was visible in Diskpart in cmd. I want to stress that even with the mod it took a fair bit of noodling to get it to work in windows. I had to erase the partition via the enclosure connected then mod it, than connected it via sata and sata power(I also tried creating a partition in ANOTHER enclosure because my pc was too messy and large for me to mess with currently but ended up having to anyways to get it to work). Still didnt show up until I ran diskpart in cmd to see if it saw it, it did but then had to run clean command before it let me erase or create any partitions with it. This wasnt as simple as some reddit posts or youtube videos made it out to be. So just a fair bit of warning to anyone who hasnt done this before, its doable just more work than youd expect, if youve done some troubleshooting in the past i believe you would be able to handle the process. The most annoying would be the 3.3 volt mod as that required a bit more finesse with chubby fingers and poor eye sight. Some say you need to cover the one pin but i saw others mention that you can cover the remaining pins with no issue so i went that route, it made it easier to cut and cover with electrical tape and scissors. The drive itself. The 8TB runs pretty damn hot outside of the enclosure, temperature was 50-55C, laying bare on the wood table while i was copying about 3.5 TB of data to it about nine hours process, I cant imagine how hot it runs INSIDE the enclosure it came in(the enclosure does not have any fans only air gaps for it to exhaust). When i stuck it in my case with a lot of airflow, 2 140 fans front intake hitting the drive directly, they ran at 28-30C. A lot more reasonable. I dont really care about the speed I just want reliable storage to hold all my data backups and it seems ok, will edit if it fails within a few months etc. The temp it was running at bare kind of sucks so your mileage will vary. Currently copying data to it so cant do a speed test, you can probably find another review posting speed so look at their review for that. What an annoyance to get this thing running, but the savings was worth it I guess.

The drive works. Just plug it in, turn it on, let Windows install the relevant drivers, & youre good to go. Ive had it for only a couple of days so I cant address durability. But my experience with other Western Digital equipment has been good. Theyre a reputable company for a reason. I decided I ought to be prudent & do a full format of the drive, not a quick format. It took a day. Yes, a whole 24 hours. On a USB 3 port. This is not a complaint. Its 20T. Thats a ridiculous amount of space. Format takes time. This is NOT a shortcoming of either the drive or your computer. If you do a full format, plan for it to run a long time. And any sizable backups you do to the drive will also take a long time. Dont complain about it. Expect it. Actually, the size of the drive is 20,000,553,295,872 bytes. Thats a human number. That is not actually 20T. 20T is 20 times 2 raised to the power 40. In human numbers, 2**40 is 1,099,511,627,776. 1T is not 1 trillion. They are different numbers. Drive manufacturers like to say their devices are a certain number of T. They are intentionally inflating their numbers to mystify the unsuspecting consumer. Learn. This 20T hard drive does not contain 20T of space. It is actually 20,000,553,295,872/1,099,511,627,776T, which works out to 18.19T. Windows reports it as 18,626.97G. Computers work in powers of 2. Disk drive manufacturers dont. Understand the difference. 20T is actually 21,990,232,555,520, nearly 22 trillion, larger than the manufacturers claim that the drive is 20T. Dont be fooled. Its just fun with figures.

If you want actually 16tb dont buy this. This was a nasty surprise to say the least. That being said this works very well. I could transfer media and files from my dying drives over to this very quickly and without issues so it was worth it. That being said the actual drive capacity is lower than what was advertised which is annoying to say the least.