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

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.

Excellent service. Very pleased.

Everyones computer setup is different, so plugging in an external HD will yield different results for some. My initial experience with WD backup drives have mostly been with their Passport line, and I didnt like their old automatic backup software. It took up a lot of computer resources (especiallly on my laptop), and it was really confusing to specify custom directory backups. The MyBook 4TB is serving as a backup to another backup (which is a Seagate 2TB external HD). Installation was pretty simple and I like that they included the USB 3.0 cable. I like the automatic backup software that comes with the MyBook. Its easy to understand, and also it shows you a visual representation of the categories of files you are backing up (I.e.- documents, photos, videos, etc). The Mybook is also relatively quiet compared to the Seagate 2TB that I have. It comes with password encryption, but I decided not to utilize that feature in case I forget the password. I also havent used the optional cloud feature using Dropbox, even though I have an account with Dropbox. I dont think I will use it for my desktop use. Honestly, some of the reviews I read prior to purchasing made me think twice about getting the WD, but I think a lot of the issues people have with their WD might simply be due to their specific computer setup. I had a good experience with the Mybook, and would purchase another one. I was also considering the new Mycloud by WD, but after reading some conflicting reviews about connectivity issues, I decided to go with a non-cloud backup solution and got the MyBook. Considering the pricepoints of the 2-3-or 4TB, I decided to go with the largest capacity. The price-per-TB was cheaper to get the 4TB model. Hard drive capacities are constantly getting larger and larger as the physical footprints are getting smaller, so you might as well go big while the memory is cheap.

This hard drive is a ok NOW after I FIGURED IT OUT MYSELF... but the issue I have is with the company of Western Digital. SERIOUSLY BAD CUSTOMER SUPPORT. I have the newest 2013 Mac Pro (the black cylinder) So I got this hard drive since I need a lot of storage and all my other older USB3 western digital HDs work fine with my computer. I was hoping to get a super fast drive, but I know its a fairly ok model but not the fastest for doing all the massive graphics work I do - but it states very clearly on the site WILL WORK WITH MAC as long as you format the drive (I know what I am doing on that front). Anyway I received the product and right out of the box it didnt work! Frustrating as heck since I needed it immediately and all my other hard drives plug and play instantly with no issues. I tried it in my other computer and still no response. I was hoping I didnt need to call customer support but I had to in the end to see what was wrong. First of all let me explain how bad you can be as a company to offer hard drives that state they work with Mac and APPLE computers but NOT HAVE A DAMN CLUE on the most recent Apple computer. Seriously!? So the tech didnt even know what the newest Mac Pro computer was...I was dumbfounded, but besides the point, he didnt even try to call in a Mac expert in their department, or they dont even have any people on staff who know what a Mac is. So after trying literally everything we BOTH could think of he told me to download the latest USB drivers and install it on my Mac. I did and guess what happened? MY MAC WOULDNT START UP AGAIN! My computer stopped working. He basically said he would call their Tier 2 level support and that no one was available to help me that day....HA! What kind of company offers support but when you have a real issue basically hangs up on you?! Oh and after wiping my computer clean and reinstalling MAC OS it finally came back to life and thank God I had a time machine backup. Then the next day as a last resort I swapped the USB cable that it came with with another cord I had and all of a sudden it worked fine! I admit I should have tried that sooner, but more importantly WHY DIDNT THE TECH SUPPORT GUY TELL ME TO TRY THAT IN THE FIRST PLACE?!?! Seems like it should be standard procedure to tell you to swap a cord to test to see if the piece of junk USB cord it came with is crap. Just bad. Long story short their support NEVER called me back even after they hung up on me basically and promised to get back to me first thing in the AM. Still to this day they have not called me. Then they had the nerve to send me a customer survey after the fact! AMAZING. So yes the drive works now but I WILL NEVER buy from these guys again after such a bad experience! I recommend not getting anything from these guys even if they are a huge company!

I like this product so much I bought a second one. The first I use for storing feature films, concerts etc. in my home theater room. You can store several hundred feature films in the highest quality on this product with 6TB of memory and it connects to my DVR and provides three times the memory of the DVR itself. I use a second for all music files, photos, etc. and connect that one to a MINIX media player in my home theater room. While all of these files for films, music, etc. can fit on one box for now, I am anticipating the time when I will need to split them up and since I connect them to separate devices, it made sense to divide things up and prepare for the future. The WB My Book is very effective for storage and yes, you can use it to back up computer files too. It is quick for storing and retrieving, quiet, and offers a large amount of storage. This device is normally on at all times since it doesnt have an on-off switch. However if you connect it to a DVR, media player, or computer via a USB cable, and shut that device off for the night, you will turn this unit off at the same time.

This is a review of the Western Digital My Book 4TB external hard drive. It came in a timely manner, and it and the packaging showed no signs of damage. The hard drive did everything I needed it to do. I have a computer with 2 1TB hard drives, and 2 128GB hard drives, and am planning to expand. Until now, I had no means of backing up the thousands of files I have accrued over the years, and had become worried about possible data loss over how long Ive had my hard drives. After getting this, and a few days of waiting, I had successfully backed up all my data to it. I plan on expanding my hard drive space by 1TB more, so the 4TB solution leaves me enough room to do so. It was slow transferring on my end, as I was running it through USB 2.0, and it can only go so fast that way. I saw no problems with the data before or after transfer. I plan on using it once every month or so to backup any new data I happen to add. So far, I have had no problems, and since Ive used Western Digital, I havent had problems until now as it is, so I expect the drive to last a long time hence.

This is a pretty great drive. I bought a 4TB for my office and liked it for backing up our Synology Nas. So when I needed something big, I got the 6TB for myself. Its great for transferring large files. Im getting around 165MB/sec transfers to and from my internal Intel SSD. It does have one negative that could be seen as a positive depending on how youre using the drive. It winds down and goes into a kind of low power state pretty quickly. So it takes some extra time to access files in that state. I want to say close to 10 secs but I could be exaggerating since it feels like forever (Im impatient). So if its simply a backup drive this is a positive as its super low maintenance and can just be left on. If you are using it to store media it could time out music playlists if you have media from different sources; I had music from my PC and from the drive playing in Windows Media Player and when it would play a PC song then try a ext HD song it would say file was inaccessible since WMP didnt want to wait for it to spin back up. It does seem to be fine for network streaming too. I stream movies from this to Kodi on my Matricom G Box Q android tv box. Overall Im very happy and would recommend this drive at a decent price.

The first drive I ordered was DOA--neither Windows nor Mac machines would recognize the drive. I sent it back to Amazon and got the replacement, plugged it into a Mac, it was recognized, so I figured it was a good drive. I formatted the drive for Mac using DiskUtility, copied about 1TB of data from my Mac over. I needed the free space on the Mac, so I deleted the content I copied to the WD MyBook. The next week, all of a sudden the drive is no longer recognized by the Mac. I unplugged it, checked the connections, and no machine will recognize it. This is two drive failures in as many weeks from WD. Rather than returning this drive to Amazon, I called WD tech support. They were willing to provide me with a referral to a data recovery service to get my lost data from the drive. I asked if I would have to pay to retrieve the data and was told that yes, but there would be a discount. I explained that I didnt think I should have to pay to recover data lost due to a result of the WD product failing in less than a week of use. I said that they should allow me to try to recover the data myself and not void the warranty so I could send it back for a new unit. (At this point, do I even want another WD product?) The tech support representative got the approval but now after removing the drive from the enclosure, I still cant get a machine to pick it up. I have a few other ideas about checking the drive and using data recovery tools in linux, but this will involve an inordinate amount of time on my part. I am surprised that Ive had two brand new units fail in as many weeks (one DOA!). I have a 2 TB My Book that Ive been using without incident for a year or so, and a 500 GB My Passport that Ive been using for years. The reliability of those items is why Ive stuck with WD but now Im rethinking my loyalty. My advice for this or any other external drive is if youre using it to clear up space on your computer, wait a few weeks before deleting the stuff from your computer. And, you probably want to back up your important stuff online for when (not if) your drive fails. You can get really cheap online storage now ($0.01/GB/month) for archival data and use some software to connect to do encrypted backups. If I could give this particular WD product zero stars, I would. Its a complete and utter fail. Update: I became concerned that I might not be able to retrieve data from the disk because some report that there is hardware encryption baked into the board of the enclosure, meaning if you remove the drive from the enclosure, you wont be able to read the unencrypted data. Tech support could not confirm this and referred me to one of their partners, and I said well, if you cant answer a straightforward question about your own product, maybe your partner can. Anyway, the partner said it just depended on the drive and that they would need physical possession of the drive to give me an accurate cost, but gave me a range of $500-$2000+ depending on what was required. So, I strongly reiterate and confirm my rating of zero stars--this product is a fail on all kinds of levels.

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.

I have an older computer and need some backup to find room for the movies Im downloading as well as backing up my drawings and documents. This device is not ideal for that purpose. Pros: quiet (most of the time) can go into standby (as long as it isnt automatically backing up anything AT ALL) Runs cool, looks good, nice and stable on the desk. Cons: the software sucks big time. Good for a total newbie maybe since it seems aimed at the user who wants to back up all classes of files like movies, documents, or photos, but for someone who just wants to back up specific files, not so good. Source Forge has much better software (for free) IMO. Some of my gripes is that the software prevents my XP machine from going into standby - even if it is set to back up monthly, it will keep the computer on 24/7 just so it doesnt miss its allotted backup time/day? It wants to phone home even when I turn off the automatic update and is running in my task list even when it is told not to turn on via windows msconfig startup programs (so it must be running from the registry) Windows treats it like any other usb storage device - so every time I power the computer up I have to look at the silly windows prompt that wants to know how I want to use the mixed files on the F/G/H drive it happens to be - and when I want to unplug a flash drive I have to consider that Im turning off the drive I really want and not the my book Performance with USB 2 is glacial to say the least. Copying from the My Book to a flash drive is a reason to find something else to do since it may take hours. Then I come back to find Windows hung up wanting to know if I really wanted to copy the one Read Only file, in a group of files. Grrr... The drive I got is noisy. Makes a high pitched uneven whirring sound. The reason I left WD drive ages ago is that they were unreliable. I can use it, but find myself unplugging the power supply since theres no on-off switch and I dont trust it. Plan B is to add a PCI to ESATA card, and external ESATA drive, and junk this piece of detritus, and put a Samsung or Hitachi drive in the ESATA case. My old solution was to just use USB2 powered portable drives and put them in a safe place when the backup is done - the My Book is more hassle IMO. Just for the hell of it, I went on line to see if I could open the case and install a power switch on the front. The two utube examples I found turned out to be made by professional data-recovery specialists - that certainly doesnt bode well. Since writing the above I implemented plan B and that has proven far superior to the WD My Book. My compact IBM Think Centre was pretty well maxed out with 2.5 SSD and 1 TB 2.5 drive packed into the slot for one full size drive (all it was designed for). I added Vantec 6-Port SATA II 150 PCI Host Card, for 4 Sata drives with 2 external eSATA ports, and a Sabrent 3.5-Inch SATA/SATA II to USB 2.0/ESATA external enclosure. Windows treats it like a normal hard drive with its own assigned letter, windows can put it in standby if Im not using it, and all the hassle with the WD/Windows software is out of the picture. If you already have a spare SATA connector/port on the mother board you only need the $20 enclosure and not the $25 PCI card - although you still need an adapter to go from the SATA connector to a computer mounted external eSATA connector (same game just designed to be sturdier) The external enclosure came with cables for both the eSATA and USB connectors (so I can move files via the USB port if the need should arise. The only complication with Plan B was that I had to use the disk manager in windows and reformat the 80 GB test drive to NTFS before windows would use it. The Vantec card was shipped with a CDROM for RAID data backup (if backup was your interest in getting a My Book, but like I said Source Forge has lots of good free utilities if that is what you need) In retrospect, Im sorry I wasted the money on the WD My Book. I guess I can pop the case on the MY Book and transfer the hard drive into another eSATA enclosure so it wont be a total waste.