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

Wife is a photgrapher and has LOTS of photos. This gives her a dedicated drive for all of her photos. Simple to set up, super simple to use. Just drag and drop. No software to load or deal with.

It worked as expected and it is plug and play. I will recommend it.

FIRST THINGS FIRST (The Problems): - >I keep this on my tower which is by my legs when I sit at my desk. It gets knocked over easily, so I would recommend keeping it behind your computer monitor or somewhere where it cannot get knocked over easily. - >The plug (Typical United States 2 prong build) is bulky and may take two outlets of space due to the design. It blocks off other outlets if there is one below it. Always reserve the bottom plug for this one. - >The cables are quite short and can be a problem if you do not have a plug within a few feet of your SSD. I was lucky to have an extension nearby to assist with this issue PERFORMANCE: - > Really fast, Opens and runs games with absolutely no issue (GTA V, Ghost Recon Wildlands, Destiny 2, Skyrim, StarWars™ Battlefront, Etc.) - > File transfer speeds are extremely fast - > Good for Plug and Play. Holds all of your games, work files, everything. The drive is easy to transport, but it can be a bit bulky. It is roughly the size of a standing Wi-Fi router. - > The rubber feet on the bottom keep it from sliding quite well - > Case is plastic, and could be damaged, So dont be throwing it at any walls - > Plugs into PC Via a USB Type A to USB Type A, allowing for quick transfer. Overview: Great speed and portability for the price. The build isnt perfect but it will do great on a desk. I wouldnt recommend using this for laptops due to the cables and such. Holds games, software, files, everything of the sort. Perfect for the gamer on the go, or a home office setup.

Using this connected to a Asustor NAS, have lots of media and this drive is currently housing all the movies I have, works great and spins down when Im not watching something on Plex. Have loaded it up with almost 12TB of content so far and no issues, runs great. Actual formatted capacity will always be less of course, but overall this fits my needs perfectly!

Funciona bien. La capacidad es la indicada y llegó antes de lo esperado.

Me gusta lo cómo del disco y la conexión es rápida con el ordenador

Pro - Simple White Label WD drive inside, passed stress test with no issues Con - Much more difficult to shuck than lower capacity models, power cable is quite short for anyone planning on using it as an external drive

Ive had this drive for around a year now. It continues to perform great. I have decided to purchase 2 more since they are so reliable. The read/write speeds are reasonable and I have never received an error. I currently have this 12 TB and 2 5 TB drives hooked to my Lennox tower. I am running the current version of Windows 10.

Skip to What Worked to see how I managed to get it to show up. My WD 12TB drive was formatted in ExFat on my mac pro. I loaded it with movies and tv series I purchased to watch on different tv sets in my home. These were all converted to MP4. After loading the HD around August of 2022 with about 3-4TB of files, I hooked the HD to my tv and was able to watch my recordings with no issues. Power Switch The HD does have a power switch. It is located just above the rear terminal ports. Its weird switch and difficult to find but its there. Its about 1 x 1/4 inch plastic lever that blends in with the surrounding black plastic casing and is laid out across the width of the casing--so the 1 inch is the width and the 1/4 inch is the height with the unit standing vertical. Anyway, press the area until you feel it give a little. The lever hinge is located towards the inside so the lever is pushed in more towards the left edge, when viewing it from behind. You have to depress the switch for a few seconds until you see the light finally turn off. Note that if its blinking, then you will have to depress the switch until the blinking cycles 1-3 times, then it will turn off for good. If the light is solid, then depress the switch until the light does out. The Problem So last week, I wanted to add a few more movies that I purchased a few years earlier and wanted to watch later. When I hooked up the HD to my mac, it wouldnt show up on my desktop. So I thought I would restart the computer. That worked. I brought the HD back to a tv and watched one of the movies. Then I wanted to add a few more movies. So I hooked it up to my mac, and the same thing occurred. HD didnt show up. This time nothing worked. For about 2-3hrs I tried everything. The drive didn’t show up in Disk Utility at all. All the fixes I found on the web didnt work. I tried everything I could find on the web. Nothing worked. Most of the web pages stated that if those 4 or 5 fixes didnt work, then the HD is likely damaged. Good thing I didnt try to use my tv video equipment to reformat the HD, because the issue wasnt a bad HD. I knew this to be true because it worked fine on my video equipment. The problem was with the computer hookup. I hooked the HD to a MacBook Pro and same problem. Interesting Discovery I looked at the HD lights when hooking up to the tv set. Apparently, the HD goes through a startup phase and the light blinks while the video equipment is getting setup to access the files. I noticed that when I plugged it in the mac, the light would simply turn on and stay solid, so it appeared that the startup phase was not occuring. One of the articles I read said to insert the USB terminal into the computer very slowly as there is some kind of power issue with USB technology that has been a bug forever. I thought if this was true, then it would have the same issue no matter what I hooked it up to, but I tried this anyway. All I got was the the light turning on and staying solid. I did it many times and it didnt change a thing. It wasnt a solution. I was about to give up, but I thought I this power thing was something I wanted to keep trying. What Worked So I inserted the USB terminal very slowly. (I think it might have been on the HD end this time and not the computer end of the cable). The moment the light turned on solid, I backed it out. I kept doing this ever so lightly about 5 times, until the light began to blink on its own. I let go of the cable and the light continued to blink. After a few more seconds, the HD appeared on the desktop! I then fully inserted the terminal and it stayed on. After that, I immediately performed First Aid from Disk Utility. Ran it on the disk then ran it on the volume. No issues discovered. So its some kind of issue with the USB technology. I hope this helps folks. After several shutdowns and restarts of my Mac, the HD is loading up now.

I bought two of these to expand my storage space. I already have four of the 10TB WD My Book. Through utilities, I can turn off the power down timer in the My Book drives so they are always ready to go when I need them. When not using, I turn them off manually using switches on the USB hub. Unfortunatelly, my new Elements drives power down on their own after about 15 minutes, so when I try to use them, I have to wait each time while they spin back up. I cant find any WD utilities that work with the Elements drives to allow me to turn off the power saver feature. An email to WD directed me to a link to the same non working utilities that came with the drives. The error you get from the included WD utilities tells you to connect a valid Western Digital drive, when they are already connected and working. Other than not having utilities to turn off power saver mode, these drives are reliable and fast at just over 200 MB/s sequential read/write benchmarks.