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

I have used WD external hard drives for several years because they have never failed me horribly. Of course, I have ones that are over 7 years old and yes, they do die eventually but they have always let me know they were on their way out (working slowly, error messages when trying to open a file). I have never had one just up and die with no warning so Ive always had time to get a replacement and decommission the dying one. This 6TD hard drive is no different. It is working beautifully. Yes, it does take time to transfer files (my files are HUGE art files) but I just grab a bunch and set them to copy overnight so it doesnt interfere with my day. All my WD My Book drives (I have 5 of them now - 2 are deceased) work as designed and are perfect security for me to back up my files. I use my 3 TB drive on a daily basis and I use this 6 TD to back up my 3 TB drive and my computers (3 of them). I do not use the software to back up files (Ive read bad things about it) so I just back up manually. Love WD My Books and would probably never switch to another brand.

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.

I bought this unit to serve as an external hard drive for my Dish Network Hopper with Sling. So, while I cannot report on its performance as a computer file backup unit, I can say it has been everything I hoped for to store my recorded movies and TV shows on the Hopper. It simply plugs into the Hopper with a USB connection and is immediately readable by the Hopper as an extra hard drive. The playback seems nice & smooth and it is easy to transfer recorded content from the Hopper to the EHD -- and also from the EHD back to the Hopper. It does not copy the content -- it transfers it from one to the other and frees up the storage space on the source hard drive. One note of caution: The recordings made with the Hopper are done with proprietary coding by Dish Network. As such, the content can only be played back through the Hopper or other advanced Dish DVRs -- it will not be readable by a computer. So, as long as you are with Dish Network, this is an excellent way to double the 2 TB storage capacity of the Hoppers hard drive. A very good product.

For those linux users out there, the hardware of this device is sound but the implementation of the drive partitions needs some help. I doubt many are running windows XP anymore so the need to use an MBR partition vs GPT is minor. This came with two two x 2 gig partitions that had 512 byte sectors which has a limitation of max size 2gigs. This is probably for backwards compatibility and caused a lot of grief with my systems mounting the drive and for me to use it to backup my play station and then as a backup storage drive. My PlayStation would not even see this as a suitable backup device. I ended up re-partitioning this with GPT so it was one partition and everything has since worked great on everything and is one single partition which is what I was expecting. For those that want to know more about partition tables, look here. For those that want to know what product can do this, I used GParted on a linux boot cd. Might save someone else alot of googling and figuring this out. [...]

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.

$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 writing this review primarily to warn against trying the version of Acronis True Image software provided with WD My book hard drive. Some background: I am an engineer, I know about computers, I have a modern machine running Windows 7 freshly installed. Aware of the problems that Windows 7 has with drives over 2 Tbyte, I bought the 2 Tbyte size. It was to replace one of two WD 2 Tbyte USB backup drives that just failed after 16,000 hr of (powered) use. The new drive went in with no problems. It took something like three overnight sessions to copy 600 Gybes from my primary backup drive to this secondary backup drive over USB 2.0. Now to Acronis. I learned Acronis True Image had the ability to open a large Windows image file and to extract individual files, something which Windows itself cannot do. I had such an image, a single, huge 600 Gybte file on my old 2 Tbyte WD USB drive, and I wanted to recover a few files from it, so following instructions from WD, I went to the Acronis web site and downloaded the (included) WD version of its True Image backup software. The problems started when I tried to install it. The progress bar went to about 70% (deleting files) and stopped. After it didnt move for five or ten minutes, I clicked cancel, no response, tried ctrl-alt-del, no response. It looked like a total lockup. After power down and reboot, I was forced to use System Restore to get back to my desktop. I probably should have given up on Acronis at this point, but a few days later, really wanting to recover those files, I gave Acronis another try. It is not that uncommon to have to install programs twice. I again downloaded it and ran install. Again the progress bar appeared to freeze at the same point, but this time I just waited and surprisingly after 10-15 min with nothing happening on screen it suddenly said the install was successful. The program ran, but it just crawled, I cant believe this is normal, but still ever so slowly it would respond to clicks, and I was able to recover one program and two videos from the Windows image backup file. Even though the recovered videos could not be played, the recovered program ran, so Acronis was at least partially working. Since Acronis was running so poorly, and it had done its job, I tried to uninstall it, but it would not uninstall. Yikes! To clean it off my machine I resorted to to deleting its directories and files hoping that any residue it left behind would be harmless. However, this is backup program, and I soon found it has more than files and registry entries, it installs drivers (six of them)! Drivers which I could see with Device Manager were still in place for my disk and USB ports, though they were listed after Microsoft drivers. Thinking they were no longer active I searched them out and deleted them, and again when I rebooted I was forced into window recovery mode to regain control. Youve been warned. I wondered if my experience was off the charts, so I did a little research. Acronis is mentioned in only a few of the 300 or so reviews of this drive, three negative, but most positive. However, a review of the (full) Acronis True Image program on Amazon found a lot of reviewers complaining that Acronis, once a reliable backup program, had gone down hill. (Update) With hindsite this is my GUESS at what happened. Acronis has a slow install with long pauses that can lead you to believe the install has hung, combined with an inability to cancel the install at that point. When I recovered from the first failed install using Windows System Restore, Windows didnt fully roll back the system (as it claims it does) something was left behind. What was left behind (registry entries, drivers, who knows?) then messed up the running of program when it was re-installed, and far worse it prevented the Acronis uninstall from working. Youve been warned...

I bought this WD 3TB My Book external hard drive to transfer my giant and growing photos library off of my Apple iMac. The transfer was painless, and it updates easily when I download new photos or when backing up to my time machine. This is my second My Book. The first is three years old and Ive had no issues with it. I find this brand reliable and fairly priced. The only reason I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 is because I had to reformat it (knew this when I started) but it was not explained in the internal set up directions. Nothing a quick google search wouldnt fix, but I can imaging the more technically challenged of us would appreciate a bit more guidance up front. Quick Tip- my first reformatting attempts failed several times over. I had inadvertently opened the drive in finder on my computer, so it would not format as it was in use. I ejected and deleted all existence, plugged it back in, and it went smoothly from there.

Nice product. Be sure you are familiar with setting up computers/software if you buy this. Step 3 on the box says install the backup software but there is none included in the package. Panic. Will I have to return it? No. You simply have to figure out where to find and download the appropriate software from the internet, and there are NO instructions on how to do this. Fortunately Ive worked with personal computers a LOT, have an engineering degree, and was able to read between the lines enough to get it all done. Once set up with the software installed, this is an excellent tool for backing up your operating system, pictures, files, etc. (basically everything on your computer). It also allows continuous file updates. Very intuitive, easy to use, and graphically informative after it is up and running. Plus it works with Dropbox for additional capability. It appears to be ideally suited for Windows 10. Now Im happy I bought it, AFTER getting over the temporary frustration of not knowing where to find the associated software, checking for prerequisite software, and updating the software after downloading. Voila! Just what I needed.

Until now Ive only had one full size external drive out of about a half-dozen the past ten years. The rest have been the smaller portable types, powered off the USB cable itself. This one has external 12 volt DC power supplied by a wall wart that plugs in a household AC socket. The drive is not designed to get power from the USB cable, which is incompatible (5 volts). The drive is intended to be put somewhere and left alone, and to accomplish that theyve given you cables that are nice and long to place this unit out of the way. The 3.0USB cable is data only. NO power, so remember to keep the AC Adapter with the hard drive if youre like me and put it all away except when backing things up manually. This hard drive runs very quietly. I cant hear a fan blower if there is one, and I dont hear the chunka-chunka of the hard drive reading and writing. Nor does it whine after its spun up to speed. One shortcoming is the lack of a power switch. Why did they delete what was on earlier models? I still eject the drive when done, wait for the popup safe to remove, and unplug the USB cable. I have the wall wart (transformer adapter) on a power strip that gets turned off when the computers not being used.