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

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.

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!!

Used this for dish dvr 722 external drive and works well to save recordings.

This product was a single design decision away from getting five stars. It is inexpensive and works well. The design decision that breaks it is what happens if it stops working well. The drive has an unreliable USB connection on the back. I think its a USB 3.0 micro type B jack, which is standard, but basically all mini and micro USB connectors are under-engineered and prone to failure. So if you dont treat it like a pint of nitroglycerine, your drive might just stop working. That seems to be a common problem. This, however, is not the fatal design flaw, because if that were the entire story, you could just take it apart, pull out the drive, use another adapter to plug it into your computer and be back in business. But you cant do that. It appears that WD drives that come with their Smartware are hardware encrypted whether you use a password or not. WD argues that this prevents a thief, even if you dont use a password, from removing the drive from the enclosure and reading your data. Thats true, but a thief wouldnt do that. He would just take the whole thing and plug it in, and it would work. What it does prevent is you from recovering your data if anything happens to that flimsy USB connector. Your data is locked. This is exactly what some early viruses did: they encrypted your hard drive so that you couldnt read it if you removed the virus. Oh, if you want to try soldering surface-mount semiconductors (anticipate failure) or paying one of the affiliates a months salary to decrypt it, you might get it back, but why should you have to do that? You might be able to find an empty enclosure with the exact same controller (emphasis on might). Hardware encryption in this case is pointless. If you want to encrypt your data, you can do it yourself instead of having it automatically encrypted with a key you dont know. I think they put it in so theyd have another bullet point in their sales flyer to impress people who dont understand computer storage. I loved this drive at first, until the USB connector got flaky (it still works if I treat it with kid gloves and promise it a cream cake later) and did some further research. That automatic hardware encryption is a deal-breaker. From now on, Ill just buy a SATA hard drive of my choice and put it in an enclosure with a standard USB/SATA interface, and if I want the data encrypted, Ill encrypt it. You can do that for about the same price. Amazon sells both.

I bought this specifically to use it as an external storage option for my Xbox One, which was down to less than 10% available when they released the update that allowed external storage in early June 2014. If you are considering this drive as an external drive for your Xbox One system, I can assure you it handles the task quite nicely! When I plugged the drive into an available USB 3.0 slot on the back of the Xbox One, the Xbox One immediately recognized it as an external storage device, and asked if I would like to format the drive. Formatting was very straight forward and very quick. The Xbox One OS also gives you the opportunity to name the drive, which I kept at the default External so you can tell internal storage from external storage. Another nice feature is that the Xbox One gives you the option to always install new content to the external drive until it is full. If you select this option, then anything that is installed from this point forward will be installed to the external drive, as long as it is connected. Its a great drive, very quiet, very quick, and I have no issues playing games off of it rather than the internal drive. Again, if you are considering this for an external storage option for your Xbox One, do it!

I bought this external hard drive to add to my Xbox One so my review will be covering that if that is what you plan to do. Getting the hard drive to read was easy--you simply plug it in. All of your games are shown on one menu and you have the option to download future games on the hard drive only. You can also change the settings to download where you want every time you get a game, or you can view your games based on internal/external storage. The hard drive itself is super quiet, I dont ever hear it. It does have its own power supply so plan accordingly if youre short on room. The glossy finish compliments the Xbox Ones and its small enough to not be too much of a distraction, or you could just simply tuck it away. The hard drive is just as fast, or faster than the internal one on the Xbox One. Games load up the same, or faster. However, dont think for a second that GTA V will load any faster because GTA V is well...still GTA.The only minor complaint I have with it is it has a bright white light that shines like a lighthouse when the hard drive is working. Its only really noticeable in complete darkness though. Perhaps its simply because Im a creature of the night! Overall, I would highly recommend this product if youre looking to increase your hard drive space for the Xbox One. You will not be disappointed.

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 review is for the Western Digital My Book 3TB External Hard Drive used exclusively with the Xbox One system. The product appears to be made out of high quality materials with plenty of cooling ducts. It runs cool and has never been hot to the touch, even after a marathon of installing games for a day and a half straight. It does use a box-style power adapter if wall outlet space is an issue, and the proprietary USB 3.0 cable can be a little tricky to snap in but you only need to do that once. Once powered on and plugged in the Xbox One recognized it instantly and asked to format which was very quick, and gives you the option to install all further content directly to the external. So far I have installed 12 digital and 14 disk games on to the external. The installing process does take a tad longer compared to installing to the internal but not by much. When launching a game off the external it does take an extra 1-2 seconds to launch the game but once in-game there is ZERO difference compared to playing off the internal. No extra load times, no framerate issues, no texture pop-in, etc. I can also confirm that when the Xbox One is set to low-power (standby) mode the external drive also goes into a low power/sleep mode when you turn off the console. If youre considering getting this for your Xbox One and need the space like I did, I would ask you what are you waiting for?

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.

Excellent service. Very pleased.