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

I now have two of the 3 TB drives and one of the 4 TB drives (Ive had the 4 TB drive for a little over a year now). I have not had any issues with any of them. I have an external drive that is a bit faster, but for the price point these are good drives and hard to beat. I can generally maintain 105+ MB/sec write speed over the USB 3.0. For approximately $50 more I could have gotten an external drive that is significantly faster, but for writing once then reading as necessary these drive fit what I need them to do without my feeling that the writing time is excessive even when transferring fairly large files. Note: If you are using Windows, then you must go to the device manager and apply the setting for this drive to where it is set for better performance in order to get maximum Write speeds. There is also an option to turn off the power saver mode to keep it from constantly having to start back up between writes if there is going to be significant time between writes, and if you are more interested in speed than power consumption and possible drive wear. If you dont do those things, then you will not get the best write/read performance due to the drive powering up at the start of the read/write and/or Windows treating the drive as a USB quick release drive. Both of these settings change how quickly files will be written to the drive but for different reasons. As always, how you choose to apply these settings are up to you as the user. Personally, I attach these drives to one computer and rarely move them afterwards. So, I have no need of being able to unplug them from the system without using the windows disconnect USB device option first. Ill take that extra step on the odd occasion when I might need to move one of the drives for the added speed the rest of the time. I turn off the energy saver because I dont like waiting 10 sec or more for the drive to start writing after I try to move something there. I dont worry as much about extra wear from it being on as I get tired of the wait. That is how I like to use them. You should do what works best for you.

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.

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!

5 stars out of the box for copy and paste back up. Id never had an auto backup that worked well enough to use it. After almost giving up, I can now say that the scheduled hourly back up works fantastic without having any impact on the performance of my i5 4GB computer. I now give the SmartWare backup software 5 stars for the file based hourly scheduled backup. Here is what might cause others to rate it lower: 1) I think that it has to be on-line when you initially set it up. I kept getting an RPC server is unavailable error even when I tried the back up immediately option and I think that it even happened once I was on-line - so Im a little confused here, 2) I e-mailed Western Digital and went to bed, 3) the next morning, I was severely disappointed with the generic answer which was a duplicate of all of their not helpful on-line help data base, 4) while reading their garbage reply, I got a pop up that said that there was an update to their Smart Ware available, I jumped on that before the pop up got away from me never to be seen again, 5) PRESTO, SHIZAM, EVERYTHING WORKED PERFECTLY and still does 6) I praised the Lord. :-)

Just replaced 3T Seagate. I use a Mac with Yellowstone OS. Main problem is that Hard Drive is too noisy during stand-by mode. HD has 3 modes: idle (quiet), stand-by (should be quiet, but is not), and active (soft sound while drive accessed). When computer actively used, HD idles and is quiet. If I read/write information to HD activity is reasonably quiet and brief, and then returns to quiet idle mode. When the computer goes to sleep, however, the HD inexplicably becomes very noisy, with constant oscillating between a quiet sound followed by a high-pitch sound; back-and-forth continually for hours until HD called back into action with computer use. I called WD support, which claimed stand-by mode should be quiet and this is a malfunction and possibly a sign of failure. But this is a new drive and the flashing LED light correctly followed the blinking code assigned by the user manual between idle/stand-by/active. Whether a sign of a defect or by design, noise is intolerable. I am returning this drive. A subsidiary and minor issue is that HD works for mac but is not optimized for mac. Drive was recognized by mac when plugged in, with user manual and applications immediately readable. However, I could not write information to the new drive. I attempted to formatted with the disc utility but it did not take. I had to call WD support and they explained a strange (for me) way to write to the disk--you dont format but you go to the partition section to format the WD drive. As noted, I am having issues with the stand-by mode. Before returning HD I tried out the WD application that came with the drive. It is an older version of the program that apparently has an update. I downloaded the update but it never takes: when you re-run the program, it remains the old version and again prompts you to download the current version (~.12, which never takes). I will give credit to the support network. They were accessible even on a Sunday. Reference for support 122015-10605966

I purchased the WD MY Book 6TB USB 3.0 hard drive after filling up a 4TB drive like it. Well, Im down to about 1TB left on the 6TB just from backups in just under 4 months so its been well used already. Its fast enough. I find both drives have issues on my Windows 8.1 machines about file properties if I try to move a drive from one PC to another - cant delete files or such where I have to take over file ownership of the files on the PC it was not installed on originally. I dont know if this an OS thing or just something about these drives. Frustrating to say the least; never experienced this on my Toshiba portable drives of which I have several. I do hope they are durable as I buy all drives knowing I will never send them back for repair or exchange once Ive begun real use of them (versus my original testing files) as my private data is on them. I wouldnt trust it out of my hands even if the data is encrypted. Its a gamble every time I buy a drive and I hope this gamble pays off in the long run. I have never installed the software that came installed on any drive.

Bought this specifically for the Xbox One. Excellent product! Tons of storage, runs very quiet and is quick. Takes up very little room, which is always a plus. Highlights that I do not believe were outlined in other reviews being used for the Xbox One. There is a cool white LED light on the front of this drive which is used for visual that it is on and working. There is NO on/off button however. The LED on the front remains constant while the console is on, only blinking quickly as the HDD is working, and simply flashes every 2-3 seconds when the console is off. In Stand-By mode, the drive remains active, but still flashes like every 1-2 seconds. Once this HDD is plugged up to your Xbox One you can not only choose what you would like to move to it, but also whether to make the external drive the default drive for new game/app downloads or leave the internal HDD of the Xbox One as default. You can change this option any time you wish by going into settings. I noticed that with games downloaded to the ext HDD, they booted up a good bit quicker than when they were installed on the internal drive. The best part about this drive is that once you have all of your games downloaded to it, you can simply unplug it and plug it in a friends console, or any other Xbox One console, and you can play any of your games. Pretty cool! Well worth the price for something that should have been internal on the Xbox One.....4TB HDD.

Over the last 4 years Ive purchased four of these drives (3 for myself and 1 for my sisters household). Pros in no particular order 1. The three drives I ordered for myself have worked fine and are still working fine. 2. Large capacity and fairly inexpensive for a fast(ish), but still portable drive. 3. Good warranty support from Western Digital. While Ive never returned one of these drives to WD Ive had to return a couple under warranty over the decades and Ive never had an issue with returns. Cons in no particular order 1. Unfortunately the last drive I ordered for my sisters household was defective. 2. It took more effort that I wouldve thought necessary to determine the drive was bad. The WD quick test indicated no problems and the extended test also indicated no problems. After the tests pasts I moved to looking at the PC it was attached to (Id seen similar symptoms that led to the motherboard BIOS eventually). That didnt pan out so I tried the drive on another desktop and the behavior repeated. So I tried the HD write zeros test (which destroys the data on the drive) and it found the drive was bad; and then the extended test agreed after the zero write failed. Im disappointed the extended test didnt initially detect a problem and I had to resort to the destructive zero writes test. 3. The 1st drive I purchased had a 3 year warranty. The warranty for the last 3 I purchased was only 2 years.

Its fast, cheap and it has proven reliable thus far. It uses USB 3.0 for a direct connection to your machine. The 5400 rpm drive runs nice and cool. It comes formatted as NTFS, as opposed to the Mac Version which comes pre-formatted as HFS. Anyway, it isnt writable out-of-the-box if youre using Mac OS X. WD does offer downloadable applications to reformat the drive, but its easier just to use Macs Disk Utility to format it as HFS+. It takes just a few minutes to reformat it. If youre using it to expand your machines storage, then this is a great choice. I also have a 128 GB Transcend Jet Drive which is a more sleek, and portable option, but its about the same price, much less storage space and the write speeds for 1+ GB files isnt noticeable. I recommend partitioning the drive in a different formats if you plan on using it for more than just desktop storage. I bought this to double as a media storage device that I could connect to my TV via USB. For most modern TVs, you no longer need an external media server to deliver your digital movies. Instead, you can just use the TVs USB interface. However, Roku players and most TVs dont support HFS. Even Roku actually claims to support it, but it doesnt in my experience. So long story short, consider creating a partition pm the drive formatted as NTFS or ExFAT before you load all of your files onto it. It requires its own power supply (as opposed to bus power), but its lightweight and portable. The plastic casing is on the cheap/flimsy side, but the product looks decent. Its quiet and well-ventilated.

$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).