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

MEMORY ALPHA - MEMORY BETA. I have been using computers since 1995. Over all that time I have saved about 4 Terabytes of data. Oh I have everything. Movies, pictures, drawings, stuff found on the internet, poems oh man if I had to list it all it would take forever. My real problem is that all that information is spread across a LOT of old hard drives that still work thank goodness but, they are rather long in the tooth. I looked at backing all this stuff up on optical disk but even blue ray at 25GB is too small. I wanted an all in one place hard drive solution where all my different computer drives could be emptied and indexed. This single new drive will contain my computer lifetime in a way that I can go through it all without having to dig out old computers hoping they still work. I have consolidated most of my information on new media from my oldest systems. But still much of my life on hard drive is spread across too many disks to count. This one WD 6TB My Book Desktop External Hard Drive will serve as a one stop memory core that allows access to my whole life as a computer geek. Being an ardent Star Trek fan I could not resist calling my primary WD 6TB My Book Desktop External Hard Drive Memory Alpha. Of course being the geek I am there will be a MEMORY BETA Backup Drive as well. Who knows maybe a third backup on a 6 TB disk from another company. Western Digital drives have usually done good by me so they will be my primary backup medium.

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.

I bought this specific model because I had been using WDs Smartware Pro for quite sometime and liked it. The MBBG WD series will NOT work with the Smartware Pro software. My local computer store ...I found out only carried the MBBG series (and other WD models that soes not work with Smartware Pro) and I was desperate to replace my current 4TB drive as it was running out of space (I do photography and digital artwork as a hobby). Amazon had this specific model in stock at a fair price and after applying my Prime Membership discount (includes free 2 day shipping too) plus my CCs reward points (conveniently presented at checkout time) I ended up paying an amount no competitor website can ever match. The product arrived as promised (a few hour earlier too). Pros: The same day it arrived it just took me less than an hour to connect and do my much needed backup. This model still has the led light in the front panel which I find very useful in doing a quick visual check if my Continuous Backup setting is functioning well. The drive is quite and my older same model 4TB drive that Im replacing worked well with no known glitches at all. This model will works well for those who use WDs Smartware Pro and Acronis (I have not had a chance of bench testing the latter software). Cons: I would have given a 5 star rating for this order except when I registered the SN in the WD website it only gave me a few months for the warranty. I had been quite busy lately so I had not had a chance of contacting WD to correct the warranty period issue.

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.

This was purchased as an extra hard drive for the Wii U. 2TB is the maximum size that the Wii U will take - and I think that will be plenty! I was torn between this and a 2TB Seagate drive, but after reading reviews comparing the two, I decided to go with WD - which Nintendo suggests as one of the drives that works well with their Wii U anyway. The first one arrived, and before I even opened the box - I could hear a loose plastic piece moving around. When I hooked up the hard drive, the included USB cord would not stay connected to the back of the drive and the drive would not power up. I immediately called Amazon and they shipped out a new one, while supplying me with a label for the faulty drive. The new one works great! No loose plastic pieces within the drive, USB cord hooks up properly, the drive powers up, and we now have lots of room for the Wii U games! The black color of the drive blends right in with the rest of the equipment on our entertainment stand - so that is another bonus! Thank you Amazon for standing behind your product, and WD for making a pretty good hard drive!!

I bought this to enable the time machine features on my Mac computers. I have the new Airport Extreme, and I was looking at the Time Capsule from Apple, but I was hesitant at how much money they cost, and the fact that you cant upgrade their storage capabilities. So, I did some reading to find that you can add a USB hard drive to the Airport and get the same features. I limited my search to USB3.0 because many of my machines are connected with 1Gbps wired Ethernet, and I want the backups to be fast. Well, I am not disappointed. If I backup with WIFI it is actually not that bad, except the first backup, which is many GB in size. Otherwise the incremental backups are pretty quick, wired or not. So, this is a single 4TB hard drive in an external case. I cant believe this costs less than $150. It is amazing. Anyway, connected to my Airport the drive powers down when it is not in use, so that I know it will last a long time. It takes a few seconds to power up when I am ready, but this causes no real issues. The installation was a breeze. I plugged it into my Airport, opened the app. Went to the File Sharing and Disks tab, and added the disk. That was it. From the Mac I went to time machine and picked the shared disk as my backup, and it even recognizes it as a Time Capsule. I also use it as a network drive. Why not, it is HUGE, right? It is really quick, and has never caused me a problem. As a result, I get incremental backups on a near hourly basis. I can get the state of a file from days or weeks ago. I feel really safe with this. My old MacBook died, and I got the new MacBook Pro Retina, and I followed the restore from backup option, told it to not mess with the OS, just the apps and the saved files, and when it was done I had everything back. What more could you ask for. For under $150, the piece of mind I get for having 4TB worth of incremental backups is huge. I got the same drive and setup my parents to backup both of their computers on it. It is plenty big for this, too. They are thrilled. [...]

I bought the portable hard drive to do backups on my WIN7 computers. I found that while I could copy files to the My Book and could backup up files OK, I could not do an image backup. I got Windows error messages when I tried to do an image backup. It turns out that a lot of folks are having this problem, but solutions are not easy to find. Microsoft says that their backup programs only work with a sector size of 512 bits, but that new drives larger than 2.5 Tb come formatted with a sector size if 4096 bits. MS offered no solution. I spent some time searching forums with no luck. Finally deep into a WD forum I found a reference to a WD Quick Formatting Tool. That tool would format a disk with physical sectors of 4096, but report out a 512 sector size. A warning that formatting in that manor would not work on Win XP was included. It took more digging to actually find that tool. That tool was not included in the set of programs than was on the My Book. When I used that tool the drive ran fine and I could do image backups. I am very peeved that this problem was not mentioned in the specs. When I looked at the specs for this drive there was only one set of specs for the My Book, regardless of the drive size. If I had clicked on 1.0 or 2.0 size when I place the order all would have been fine. Since I clicked on a size greater than 2.5, the drive did not work as expected. The specs should make clear that larger drives are different than smaller ones, and the program to fix the problem should be included on the drive!

Im the IT guy where I work and Ive ordered a few of these through the years now. Ive only had one of them fart out on me and it was an odd instant (the reason I deducted a star). Out of the 4 that I own and use on a regular basis, one day I pulled one out that I hadnt utilized in a few months, plugged in and ... it didnt have anything on it, asked if I wanted to format, etc. I was surprised, but not screwed as I bought a few of these to add simple redundancy. I have 2 sometimes 3 plugged in and when I do my monthly backups on a security system I tend to copy onto these. I have it automatically backing up to a NAS on the network, but have been using these to add another level and for a few other things. I was unable to get that data back, too. Again, I wasnt screwed, but had I only been using this one drive, then YES, I wouldve been up the creek. For the record, I tried everything to get that information, various drive recovery tools and utilities, integrity scanning and everything, but no success. The drive was eventually formatted and I still use it ... but Im not depending on that one. I marked it and am still using it though. Just a note guys. But the other 3 have been dependable. Perhaps this one unit was damaged and/or bad, but ...

I bought this drive because my 2TB WD My Passport was quickly running out of space. The 4TB of space on this drive is obviously gigantic, but all that space comes at a price; speed. The drive sometimes stalls, leaving me just sitting there waiting after having clicked on a folder or something. This usually only happens when the drive has been inactive for some time and perhaps is getting the RPMs up to speed. However, this is infrequent and not a deal breaker for me, albeit annoying. The security software included with the drive which requires a password to access the drive is a nice idea, but doesnt work well. I have multiple computers which I switch between (with the drive being plugged into whichever one Im currently using) and sometimes I could unlock the drive on one computer, and sometimes another, but I would frequently not be able to unlock the drive because the software was being funny. Because of this annoyance I accepted the lack of security and disabled the software entirely. My final gripe with this product is its physical size. Its called My Book and its literally about the size of a small book (with many pages but rather small in the height department). I much prefer the size of the WD My Passport whenever I have to move it abound, but to be fair this drive has twice the capacity of that one, so thats probably an unfair expectation. Because of this larger size this drive also requires to be plugged in via a wall outlet, whereas the Passport does not. This beyond anything else is the biggest annoyance when moving the drive around, but again I do not believe you can buy a 4TB drive which does not require to be plugged into the wall. Reading this review so far, I think you would probably assume that I dont like the drive very much, but I think Ive been over critical. The aforementioned annoyances are all rather insignificant and are the entirety of my dislikes of this device, several of which cannot be avoided if you do want to buy a 4TB hard drive. I do very much like the drive, and have used it constantly in the few months that Ive had it. I think the only problem with a review on this type of product is that its hard to complement it because it does exactly what I expect it to and nothing more; which is not a problem for me. My socks were not knocked off, but the product meets my expectations; 4 stars.