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

Just received this today and my only complaint is the packaging. Came in a box twice the size of the manufacturer box with nothing more than a couple air bags that did nothing to hold it in place in the box. Very happy with the actual product so far. Linked to my XBOX without issue and was formatted and ready to go in seconds. I am blown away by the speed at which my games transferred. These games took anywhere from 1-16 hours EACH to download through the XBOX, but my entire collection transferred to this drive in a little over an hour! Based on reviews I thought this unit was going to be bulky, but it is not at all. Actually only about half the size of my modem. Reviews also reported issues with loose power/USB connections, but mine are solid and sturdy. I also read a significant amount of reviews reporting that this drive crapped out on buyers within a few months of purchase, but i cannot speak to that since it is brand new to me. Works great so far, the price is amazing for the size, and it is also a very attractive piece of equipment that looks great sitting next to the XBOX. I will be sure to update if I have any issues, but for the moment this drive gets my recommendation.

My initial inclination when receiving a new hard-drive is to do a format and then use it however I want, since the software that come with them are uaually worthless. In this case though, I decided to just try it out and found that the WD SmartWare software works flawlessly. So, I have two internal drives that I wanted to backup to this one: My main C (Windows on a 512gb SSD with some user files) and D (media, photos, videos, documents on a 2TB HDD). After installing the software that came with the WD drive, I went ahead and formatted it. Using the WD SmartWare software to setup backups was easy, but the software interface was a bit unintuitive. On full 1920x1080 resolution the really important buttons at the bottom of the backup dialog were cut off. For about 10 minutes I was trying to find out how to initiate the backup, since the setup was really basic. The scroll up/down bar was the same color as the background so I had to make the app full screen, then scroll down with my mouse wheel and got lucky to see the Enable Backup button, otherwise I wouldnt have known it was there. Once clicked, it worked great for both drives. My only problem now is that you cannot see both backups from one screen. You have to go back to the original screen, then click again to the Backup screen to see the other drive. I also found a dialog in the software that says TODO: Place buttons for UI here. Looked like a placeholder made by developers and they forgot to complete it before releasing. Anyway, my initial backup with drives C and D combined was about 2gb of data which took about 6 hours to do the initial backup, and now it will sync continuously anytime a file is changed on the source drives.

Unit came unformatted and I am not tech savvy enough to trust trying that on my own. Scott at All4Computers quickly and simply walked me through the set up and formatting This is my second WD unit and they work so well I am thinking of getting one as a secure back up in case something goes wrong with my desktop

I have a number of hard drives by Western Digital that have proved very dependable and I expect this drive will be good as well but the software that comes with the drive is very difficult to understand and in my case has caused at least a 15 hour delay in using the drive. What I needed to do was to format the drive so that it would report a 512 byte allocation unit so I could mirror my drives. Western Digitals formatting utility failed because the Bluetooth stack on my system doesnt work and no one has been able to fix it. This failure left me with an unusable drive and I had to use the Windows format utility to restore it. Of course, all the software that WD included was erased. A call to Western Digital allowed me to download some replacement software and I (WINDLG.EXE, v 1.25) and now Im sitting here looking at a dialog box thats telling me after the utility has been running for 41 minutes that Ive got another 13.5 hours to wait until the utility that writes zeros to the drive is complete. I have been assured that the I will be able to mirror this drive as it should report to windows that it has 512 byte allocation units. Well see. This situation is completely ridiculous. On the third call to Western Digital, the support person who was definitely tired of hearing from me told me the drive was defective and that I should return it. Im now looking at another 10 days or so before I can get another drive. Note that Amazon will only do refunds on this drive. You have to return the bad drive and purchase another one.

I purchased this drive largely based upon a specific need for a USB 3.0 product with 4TB of storage. Ive owned many WD internal and external HD products over time and have not had any drive failures to date over many years. I purchased this drive specifically as a backup storage drive attached to a Synology 1813+ NAS unit. This required a reformat to EXT4 as the drive comes natively formated in NTFS. The Synology NAS schedules backup to this drive of selected folder shares using the Time Backup software available from Synology. Im not utilizing any of the software included from WD with this drive (backup, cloud, etc.) as the Synology NAS has its own software for each of these purposes. The drive itself is similar in size to other My Book drives. The plastic casing is certainly not as nice as the aluminum finish on the WD My Book drives that I have for my Macs, but it is similar to the black of the Synology unit and overall looks good. The power adapter is reasonably sized (not a brick), and the unit comes with a USB 3.0 cord for use with its single USB 3.0/2.0 port. WD provides a 2-year warranty with this product. There are cheaper drives with similar specs available from other companies. However, having had drive failures with Seagate over the years, Im unwilling to take chances with other options. Its important to backup your valued files, and WD drives have played a major role in my backup solutions over time. If I have issues with this drive, Ill update my review. This seems to be another winner from WD! Edit/Addendum: Following my review, another Amazon user asked me an excellent question, Does the USB connection to the drive feel flimsy? This is a very appropriate question given concerns raised with the prior generation of this same My Book device. While I dont own the previous My Book version in question, I did check the USB connector on my device. The supplied USB 3.0 cable seems to be stable in its connection to the rear port of the My Book case. I cant physically make it move horizontally or vertically with any significance - unless I were to apply excessive force. Modest attempts at movement of the USB cable did not disrupt the connection. I dont plan to move this My Book from one place to another (its connected to my NAS), so I suppose that I wont be able to comment well on wear-and-tear issues with respect to the USB connector. Other My Book devices that I own are the Mac Firewire/USB 2.0 version. Those have never struck me as flimsy. Update 1/18/14: Since writing my original review, Ive purchased a 2nd unit which I reformatted for Mac OS X and use for time machine backup. Both drives are functioning well and have had no issues. Im still very pleased with the quality and function of the drives. Reading through a number of the questions regarding this drive, its clear that the term cloud backup as assigned by WD to this drive is a bit of a marketing stretch. As has been noted by others, the cloud backup option is not intrinsic to the drive, but an add-on service provided by Dropbox and facilitated by WD software that a user may choose to run on an attached computer (I dont personally use or recommend that others use WD software). These drives are nothing more than a WD drive, in an enclosure, with a single USB 3.0 connection. If you are looking for cloud capability, other product options do exist. I do hope that WD changes its description of drives such as this in future marketing.

I purchased this device after avoiding WD for years due to bad drives a long time ago, but after the recent rash of bad Toshiba hard drives, I decided to go back to WD and I purchased the drive, 4TB My Book for 99.99 as part of a Black Friday Flash Sale (literally was only like a hour and limit 1 per person) I decided to give them another shot, So I ordered it, got it very quickly with Amazon Prime and plugged it in, No extremley loud scratching, No clicking, Nothing out of the ordinary, but I wanted to verify the drive was good because 2 of the 3 last drives I have purchased have been bad with SMART data or just horrible grinding and clicking on day one, Needless to say they was returned ASAP. Anyways, I ran a full Extended check on the drive with WD LifeGuard Diagnostics and after 10 hours and 900 million sectores later, the drive is good, so extremely happy with my purchase for now, I cant say what will happen months down the road but after reviewing and seeing WD has really fixed there program, I dont belive I will have much issue, especially since I leave the drive unplugged from the PC I use daily to increase the life of the drive I love the WD internal drives, its all I ever purchase aside from Samsung Pro SSDs so expecting the same performance out of the externals

I have a Mac Book Pro 2014 so when I went to try this external Hard Drive to expand my computers space, it took me a few trys because I did not know how to sync hook it up properly to the laptop (What I mean is configure the thing so it could work with my computer) After I opened it I plugged it in hoping it would just convert into a Hard Drive where I could drop stuff into it. But the thing is I didnt know you were suppose to convert it to be Mac only or PC only. So after a month I found a video on Youtube that helped me figure it out. I might make one my self to help people like my self who had no idea what they doing and just went ahead and tried to get it to work. So overall, its great! once you figure out how to plug it in and convert it to a Mac or PC only then it works like a charm!

This drive is big enough to backup all of my media files multiple times, meaning that I get six to twelve months of backup history and it seems to work well. I tried some 4 TB drives from other manufacturers but they cant be formatted in a way that is compatible with Windows Backup, which made them useless for me. Thats a limitation of Windows Backup but still, Im pleased that WD offers a way to make their drives compatible. You do have to reformat the drive before it will work with Windows Backup. It should work with other software out of the box. This article explains some of the steps involved in getting WD drives to work with Windows Backup. [...] We do have a problem if we reboot our desktop computer while the WD drive is plugged in -- the machine hangs during the BIOS initialization. We have to unplug the drive, start the computer, and then plug it back in. I dont know if this is a problem with the BIOS in my five-year-old DELL or if this is a problem with the drive.

$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 bought this hard drive to add storage to my XBOX ONE, which was hovering around 98.3% space utilized. This hard drive has the space and performance you will need to add much needed space to your PC or entertainment device. I set it up within my collection of DVDs and it blends in nicely with the surroundings so it doesnt stand out. It is very quiet unless youre right next to it, and it functions perfectly with the XBOX ONE. I simply set up the hard drive, turned it on, turned on my XBOX ONE and it was immediately recognized and I had the formatting option. One star deducted because I paid for 4TB of storage but no hard drive really displays the correct storage size. Not severe enough for me to file a class action suit for false advertising, but it is very disappointing not to have the full capacity utilized when all I want to do is load game and save files into it. My XBOX ONE is hovering around 11.5% space utilized now. It will take a long time and a lot of games to fill this thing up - happy with my purchase.