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For Western Digital Elements Portable 5TB, 1793 customer reviews collected from 2 e-commerce sites, and the average score is 4.5.

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10.12.2015

I hope I'm not going to downvote my own 5-stars if / when the drive goes dead, but for now:I have already got a good 4TB drive (Touro). By "good" I mean - it's worked for a year now, so hopefully, it won't die on me soon. I needed another one, and as the touro is gone or overpriced, I was tossed between the 5GB Seagate and 4TB WG (Seagate is currently, 10/12/2015 GBP 90 at amazon, and I found this WD 4TB elsewhere for 100 GBP). I know that all drive can, on relatively rare occassions, die, which is a concern for most people, who DON'T buy them in twos for backup, and when you lose your data... oh boy. So, the guarantee itself is pretty useless, because when it dies, at best you get a REPLACEMENT,never your old data. For data recovery you can use any free or paid-for software, or pay a specialist company an eye-watering bill (GBP 800 plus).To the point: I have had both seagate and western digital (internal) drives die on me in the past, but it appears that WD is somewhat more reliable, judging by the reviews in various shops. That said, it could be that, as WD are generally more expensive, there are fewer reviewers, thus lower fail rate. In any case, those rare reviews of seagate 5TB with a simple message: drive died on me after x weeks, all data lost, I'm gutted" swayed me to go for WD. Fingers crossed.On the drive itself:1. it comes with a long enough (I'd say about 2 m long) power plug, with a lightweight plug, and with a longish (I'd say about 1.5 m) MICRO usb 3 cable (my previous 4TB hdd came with a regular USB 3 cable, which is chunkier.2. it comes with a POWER button at the back panel, which is a bonus, as I have always found lack of such power button extremely irritating - and it seems standard on most, if not all external hdd these days, so a big thumbs up for that!3. it is relatively quiet, you can hear it, but it's not annoying (yet)4. it comes with a very small while led which flashes when drive is being accessed / data moved. In a couple of portable usb 3 drives I saw such icon flash white for usb2 connection, and flash blue for usb 3 connection, not here, but not really an issue.5. speed is, as mentioned, 7200 rpm, rather than 5400 rpm. Transfer-wise, this depends not only on drive itself, but also whether it copies from / to ssd or hdd, and what size the files copied are. I'm just transferring about 1.7 GB of various data from one usb 3 drive to another, both via usb 3 port, and the speed is paltry - 18 MB/s, HOWEVER, this is for very small, e-mail files (.emls). Earlier on the rate for large tif files (up to 1.2 GB each) the speed was around 78 MB/s, which is not bad (forget about the nonsene of up to 400 MB/s for usb 3, it's lies)6. elsewhere in the comments somebody suggested this drive is good as NAS. If this is the case, on top of the power button, it'd be worth spending a tenner extra and I'd be willing to consider to buy another one for NAS purposes. If the one I bought doesn't fail unexpectadly, that is ;)Update: as Amazon's bundling together ALL capacities of the same product line, the extra comments refer to:1 x (new) 5TB variant1 x (new) 4TB variantwhich I have purchased AFTER buying the 1st 4TB unit.both new ones work fine as well, although I've noticed that the price's been creeping up since beginning of summer 2016 to the point that the 5Tb now costs around GBP 150 - 160, and for GBP160 you can get a 6TB MyBook Unit, supposedly also better hdd inside.For value for money, I'd recommend 5TB Toshiba, currently (mid-Sept. 2016), available in many shops for GBP105.Update, Nov. 2019 - 2 x 8TB - a value of "backup" can not be underestimated. Both (new) drives worked fine, no bloatware, instantly recognized (after drivers auto-installed on W7). Then one fell on the floor - dead. TOTALLY - my fault. No point sending back to WD, I don't think they even have facilities in Europe to replace faulty components (and mechanical damage is not covered by warranty, which is a fair point). Fortunately, I'll be able to recover most data from other, original hdds. All that said, I'm glad that I bought too, because with backup - which I didn't do in time, sadly - I NEARLY avoided disaster...
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12.4.2020

WD 12TB Elements (Ordered April 2020)Like most, I was purchasing these for the drives inside, rather than for use as an external unit, typically proving to be the cheaper way of buying larger drives when they're on offer.Issues that you may need to know:Firstly, and not wholely unexpected, this doesn't have the standard mounting screw holes you'd expect on older/smaller 3.5" drives, missing the middle of the three on each side in order to accomodate the additional drive platters, and repositioning the mount holes on the bottom for the same reason. This might not sound like much, but if you use a screwless case of any kind, or some kind of tray system that use the older style mounting holes,you'll likely find that can't secure these drives into the bay with the standard kit - I had to resort to some adaptation myself.Secondly, and more importantly, some older PSUs can have a problem powering these drives up due to the use of a newer SATA power specification. There's a few workarounds, so have a quick look for 'fix 3.3v issue in white label drives' if you have a problem. Using a simple molex-to-sata adapter works if you're stuck.The good:It's still very simple to open the case itself - a small flat-nose screwdriver or some plastic cards will do to pry the top-end open (from there it's just a case of pushing), and you'll need a screwdriver (Phillips head) to remove the drive from the two screws attaching the drive to the SATA/power connector. Other than that, there's some rubber mounts that simply need pushed out. There's youtube videos about removing it from the case and what to watch for it you plan on removing it (just needs a bit of care to watch snapping off some plastic clips when doing the initial steps).This is my second - the last contained a WD red, but this latest contains a WD120EMFZ-11 drive (manufacturing date of January this year), hence adding a review for those still hoping for Reds specifically. These latest models are specifically Western Digital Whites: 3.5" SATA III drive, seemingly 6Gb/s, 5400 RPM disks. In open air, spin and seek noise seems to be far better than a neighbouring Seagate drive, appearing to be very similar to some of my older, very quiet, WD Green drives. For use as a video-hosting server drive, it's pretty much ideal - very low power on idle, 5A peak during full use. My only gripe is that it runs roughly three degrees hotter than my other WD drives, including the last 12gb (an EMAZ drive), but nothing major.
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7.1.2017

At present my files are being stored on two Toshiba eStore Canvio 3TB external drives, but in practise only my images and music files are strictly being backed up to one of these drives from my laptop. The remaining movie files of my DVD and VHS collection have been uploaded for easy and quick access for streaming to my TV. So whilst I have "hard copy" as it were of my movie collection, the collection as a whole is not being backed up.Taking into account the storage I would need, 4TB is sufficient so I opted for this Western Digital model as having a good price/storage ratio.When the unit arrived I noticed a small tick on the outside of the packaging indicating W10. This is quite small and could easily be missed.Now I don't know if this has anything to do with a small issue I found, but considering I use two laptops of almost equal specification - SSD drive as drive 1 with the OS, i7 processors of more or less equal speed, and 16GB of RAM, the performance difference between the two laptops was pronounced, and it surprised me. My W7 laptop, i7 2.4Ghz, running Home Premium 64 bit is coming up to 4 years old, whereas my newer Acer V15 Nitro is last year's model and runs W10 Home, i7 2.6Ghz. Both laptops are equipped with USB3 ports. The older laptop uses DDR3 and the Acer DDR4 for which Acer claims faster data transit.First up was the W7 laptop to which I had connected one of the Toshiba USB3 hard drives to transfer my movie collection. The transfer speed was not as fast as I was anticipating and soon realised that transferring the 4TB of data from both Toshiba drives would take a lot longer than I was expecting. So I quickly connected the drives to my V15 Nitro to do a check, and the result was like chalk and cheese. File transfer now simply zipped along at quite an impressive rate. I'm no IT expert, but it does look like the combination of W10 + DDR4 makes a considerable difference. I'd sure appreciate it if an IT expert could explain it to me.Taken all in, the WD 4TB Elements seems to have been a good buy, but only time will tell how reliable it is. It looks like it is intended to be used standing vertically as the rubber feet are on its base. It does have an on/off switch but I've not worked out why as switching on and off is controlled by the laptop via the USB3 port.
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6.8.2014

This HDD has many possible uses, but this review is from the standpoint of using it as external storage on the XBOX ONE console.After being thoroughly fed-up with having to manage the ludicrously-small internal drive of my XBOX ONE, the June 2014 system update that included the option to add external storage was extremely welcome. So, I decided to treat myself to an external HDD, and after a bit of research, decided on this offering from Western Digital.Setting-up was very easy. Once connected, the unit was immediately recognised by the console and formatting it for use took just a few seconds. A word of warning about this though - I have read that once the HDD has been configured as an XBOX ONE device,it will no longer be usable on a computer, TV etc. Presumably, this is an anti-piracy measure or to prevent hackers & modders accessing game data and save files etc.If, like me, you solely intend to use it as extra storage for a games console, and nothing else, then this is not a problem, but I figured it was worth mentioning in case potential buyers would expect to find multiple uses for the drive.Design-wise, the case is visually appealing and more interesting than a generic box shape. Actually, with it's curved front and the position of the LED, it's quite reminiscent of the original model XBOX 360 when stood vertically, just on a smaller scale.Functionality is excellent - Copying, moving and deleting games to and from the drive is nice and quick and the device is very quiet and will enter a stand-by mode (which is silent) when the console is switched off.Along with increasing available storage space, the HDD will also significantly reduce loading times of any games installed. I've seen conflicting information regarding the spin speed of this model, whether it's 5400 or 7200rpm, but regardless, games do load faster than they do when installed on the internal 500GB drive. This is especially noticeable on laborious titles such as Forza Motorsport 5 and Call of Duty: Ghosts.Overall, I've been delighted with my purchase so far and would highly recommend it to anyone else in the market for additional storage for their XBOX ONE.
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3.4.2020

Delivered about an hour or two ago, gave it some time to acclimatise to indoor temp after its journey on the cold van, which you should ALWAYS do with products like this. Plugged in to a USB3.0 port on a Win10 machine, opens straight up to a nice empty folder, good to use straight away.There's some misinformation posted in a lot of reviews here, or maybe more accurately, misunderstandings, so I'll clear these up here.1. The drive size *IS* 4GB. 4,000,750,497,792 bytes to be exact.Anyone complaining that it's only 3.6TB I'm afraid doesn't understand how hard drive formatting works. Which is fair enough, you wouldn't know about this if you've little or no experience of these things.Once a drive of any kind - hard drive, SSD, flash drive USB stick - is formatted for use, you lose a proportion of all those little bytes to how file systems need to mark and index all the sections of the drive so that every bit of data can be found. Like a little address index of where everything lives on it, if you like. And that takes up some space.So, once 4TB is formatted for use, there's 3.63TB of actual file storage space left empty.2. This drive is preformatted to NTFS. Which is my own preference for this, but you can format it yourself to anything else you use, like FAT32, exFAT32, or HFS+ and APFS for Apples.3. I'm seeing both read and write speed, over USB 3.0, is 115-125MB per second.4. The actual hard drive in this package is a WDC WD40NMZW-59GX6S1SAFETY TIP: Don't lift, tilt or turn the drive (or ANY hard drive) while it's working. You might get away with it, but if you butterfingers it and drop it while it's running there's a good chance it's doneski. It's a tiny little box and meant to be easily used with laptops, tablets, etc, so it's really asking to be handled in use but TRY your best not to move it around when it's working. When it's not working, the heads park themselves safely away off from the disc surfaces inside, so dropping it then from a small height has a fair chance of being OK, but NEVER when it's running.
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29.12.2017

When this 4TB Western Digital portable HDD came up in an offer I jumped at the chance to store most of my digital life on it as a backup. Then with acres of space left to use I put all my digital movies on there along with my photos and music. It's great, capacious, quiet and so far very reliable. As USB3 it is also very fast at moving data back and forth when hooked up to a USB3 port. At this capacity USB3 is pretty much essential if you're moving large chunks of data or streaming a movie from it.But that's when we hit the problem that for me made it a 4-star experience.On my USB2 laptop it is fine moving modest amounts of data around, on my USB3 desktops it can shift vast amounts of data back and forth.On my Blu-Ray player that can stream movies off portable HDDs, this disk is not recognisable even with the latest firmware, which leads me to wonder whether the problem is that such a high capacity (under NTFS) cannot be recognised. It may come to it that I need to find a lower capacity if I want to play movies through my Blu-Ray player, or re-partition the HDD so that it becomes 2 lower-capacity logical disks. Even then I may find that in fact the drive has a greater power draw than the Blu-ray's USB port can sustain and that in fact I can't rely on USB bus power at all for this HDD/player combination.If I was to use this device only within a computing context it would be five stars, but the ability of other devices to use this via USB, and for the capacity (so I assume) to be a problem is something for a potential user to bear in mind. It was quite a disappointment to me to find it unusable for one of the main purposes for which I'd bought it, and which will require me to investigate options rather than simply plug and play..
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7.1.2019

I already had the 1TB version which I've had a good few years now and have used it very heavily on a daily basis, it's also been dropped a fair few times too, and still works perfectly.I was suprised when I received the 4TB version, as this seems to have a spinning disk inside, the 1TB is silent and vibration free, whereas the 4TB makes a spinning sound and you can feel the vibration from it.I purchased this for additional attached storage for my nVidia Shield, I was advised by nVidia that 4TB would work with the Shield (they said this was the maximum they had tested, although online forums suggest people are using larger drives successfully). It was recognised by the Shield straight away,and works fine.I did have a small issue with the sleep function on this drive, now my 1TB drive went to sleep on the Shield fine after a very short period of inactivity, which is what I want, I use the drive to store media on it, so when I'm not using the media I dont want the drive on. Initially the 4TB drive did not go into sleep mode quickly, I then discovered people were saying the 4TB drive did not have a sleep mode, after a bit of panicking, I realised it takes this drive around 20 - 30 miniutes of inactivity before it goes to sleep with my Shield, this is much longer than I would ideally like but at least it does sleep. I can also confirm that it goes into sleep mode on my Windows 10 laptop, again it takes a while longer than my 1TB drive.I get about 110mb per second write speed when transfering large files in Windows.So overall, I'm pleased with this at the moment, I just hope it turns out to be as robust as my 1TB versions.
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1.9.2014

I got this hard drive to use with an Xbox One. The XB1's 500GB internal drive may sound quite capacious, but it fills up surprisingly quickly, especially when the basic installations of some games (such as Wolfenstein: The New Order) take up almost 45GB on their own. There's also a theoretical speed boost to be gained from using an external drive - the XB1's internal SATA II drive is limited to 3Gb/s, while USB 3.0 maxes out at 5Gb/s - though the gain is minimal in reality, especially when using a relatively inexpensive hard drive such as this one. Loading times may be marginally reduced, though you'd be hard pushed to put exact numbers on the reductions.What you do get with WD's Elements is large capacity for all those games you'll be buying in the future,great build quality, flawless operation, and a look that goes very well with the Xbox One. Though the drive is more rounded than the XB1, the top of it sports vents that look very similar to the vents on the right-hand side of the console. Also like the console, the LED on the front of the drive is white (a more bluish shade of white, though it's really splitting hairs).The final point in this hard drive's favour is its noise level. It's very quiet. In fact, when used with an Xbox One it doesn't seem to add any extra noise at all - or, at least, the noise it produces simply blends in with that of the console. If you're looking for an external hard drive to expand the capacity of your Xbox One, then you can't really go wrong with this one.
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21.9.2019

I don't believe in negative reviews for hard drives.The fact and reality of hard drives is that not 100% of everyone will always receive a 100% functional one. Defective products exist, especially hard drives. So when I look at the negative reviews, I'm thinking, "what, do these people really expect WD to test a hard drive until it actually fails?". That would be absurd.A hard drive failing or heating up or experiencing some other random form of a malfunction, doesn't warrant a negative review in my opinion. That's how technology works. Sometimes you receive a faulty product and sometimes you don't so you can't hold it against the company.I have had a Seagate Portable Expansion drive fail on me from simply knocking it.I was distraught to lose everything, but I still trust Seagate and I trust my current Seagate 3TB Desktop Expansion Drive. It's years old and still functions without any issues.And I trust I will be able to get as much use out of my Western Digital as I can. If it fails, then it fails. Its inevitable and so long as I have a backup of everything, that's all that matters.People need to stop complaining and realize technology will never be perfect. You paid for the hard drive and therefore you take the risk of it failing at any point.LPT: Never have only one hard drive.
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27.6.2020

Excellent external HDD. Easy to open for those who want to extract it.Read and writes are very good, as it is NOT 7200rpm hdd.Read/ write beginning of drive 180MB/s, middle 130MB/s, end 90MB/s.Compare to Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm 2TB (2012 version), is faster at beginning 210MB/s, but then fails dramatically at 50% and especially 70% forward. Roughly at 1TB WD is overtaking Barracuda. Which was MAIN criteria for me replacing.Also, read and write at the same time (defrag) seems MUCH faster at corresponding part of the drive, than - theoretically - faster Barracuda. Means defrag of huge partition goes much much faster. To explain precisely.At the beginning of drive Barracuda has read/write around 210MB/s, but defrag goes only at around 130MB/s (read + write), which is much 'slower' than just one operation. On WD is MUCH faster. That makes vast difference going forward the drive, and at 2TB WD was consistently massively faster than Barracuda. At any given part after roughly 20% of capacity (under 1TB), 5400rpm WD was overtaking vastly Barracuda 7200rpm.Which is the important criteria, as full defrag of any size like 1TB+ takes hours.Drive does NOT seem to be shingled, within all tests I performed. Which was writing more than 10TB to disk of different data.
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11.12.2018

Excellent external drives returning excellent speeds for large files, but like most mechanical drives small files are much slower. These are perfect for backups and storing video. The drives are both quiet even in operation.10TB: Large Files: Read 208 Write 165 Small Files Read: 0.83 Write 2.914TB: Large Files: Read 205 Write 171 Small Files Read: 0.83 Write 2.8Inside the 10TB drive I found a WD100EMAZ white drive with 256MB Cache. Part Number 2W10228It is easy to use a flat screw driver to prise off the plastic outer casing. Then gently work out the four rubber corners. Unscrew the two Philips screws holding the SATA to USB-3 converter. Finally gently pull the drive from caddy – and you are done.I am not very practical, but found this easy.Once extracted: The performance is very similar to a WD Red 10 TB NAS drive. It has the same version of Firmware, the same SMART parameters, but across a range of benchmarks is very slightly slower (<5%).10TB White Drive: 210.2 MB/s Read and 209.3 MB/s WriteWD 10TB RED NAS: 213.8 MB/s Read and 214.6 MB/s WriteI have installed this in my Synology DS918+ and it is working well. Very happy.I have also installed this into a Synology DS119j and it is fully compatible.The only down side is goodbye warranty.
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12.10.2019

First of all this USB3 2TB HDD is very compact, it's essentially just a 2.5" HDD (laptop drive) in a casing with a propriety cable which I have no quibbles with.Having had two Western Digital Green 2TB HDD's inside my PC for the last 7 years I have to say I'm impressed with Western Digital's reliability. I previously had Seagate drives fail and they're awful. Avoid Seagate like the plague!Secondly it's a HDD, in an external case. You cannot drop a HDD and still expect it to work afterwards, it's mechanical and therefore had moving parts. Also it is very well known that there are always bad batches when it comes to HDD. 1-3 in every 100 are bad.As a test I copied 1.4GB of data from my internal 2TB WD Green (5,400rpm)to this external HDD and it copied at a rate of 130MB/s, slowing down to around 90MB/s near the end of the transfer, impressive! It's also silent!This WD drive is so good I just bought another smaller 1TB for my Xbox One X as the SSD I attached is showing little to no difference in loading times of my games. I might as well put that SSD to use in my PC which can make full use of the speed of it.
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10.1.2020

As someone else said here, it's not really possible to accurately rate a drive when it's brand new out of the box (after all it could fail next month), but at the time of writing (10th Jan 2020) paying £200 for 14TB is the lowest price point per TB that I've seen so far. I've previously purchased 6 and 8TB Seagates and had no problems over many years, so we'll see how this goes.Points to note for those who are unaware: This drive comes formatted out of the box (or did for me). 14 "TB" displays as 12.7 TB under Windows, but this is normal for all drives, and is due to usage of TB by manufacturers and TiB by operating systems (but displayed as TB). In otherwords,manufacturers correctly calculate the number of bytes per KB (1000), whereas for historical reasons operating systems will use a value of 1024. Putting "14TB in TiB" into Google will show this.I'm copying large files from one Seagate drive over USB 3 to this new WD drive over USB 3 and it's sustaining 185MB/s. If you're copying lots of smaller files you're unlikely to see this. It'll also depend on your source drive (read speed, connection).
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2.12.2014

I bought this to replace a smaller volume HP backup drive which was full and I've been using it about a month. It's simplicity itself to set up - just plug it in the mains power point, attach by USB to your computer (which will recognise it immediately) and off you go. You can organise backups for specific times and days or allow it to backup whenever you make changes to a file. You can also choose how many backup copies you wish to keep. The first FULL backup is completed during setup and can take a while (about 2 hours in my case), thereafter backups are fast and efficient. It is TOTALLY silent (no noisy fan), it doesn't get hot not even warm,and there is just a tiny white light flashing intermittently on the front to tell you it's operating. If you need to restore an item from backup it is easy to find the file. It's a bit smaller than the average paperback book (and surprisingly heavy) but sits unobtrusively on non-slip rubber feet on your desk or nearby - be aware that the USB cable is only about 4' long which may limit where you can place it. So far I am very pleased with it.
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26.1.2018

As far as I can tell, after only a month of using the drive, everything is to my expectations.Being a Mac user, I needed to reformat the drive to us it to back up my MacBook. Unfortunately, the instructions did not explain how to do this. Hence, I was forced to ring the support team. Being a user of High Sierra on the MacBook I was advised to reformat using one of the installed utilities on my laptop. This involved going back to the terminal interface, and working out the new parameters of the formatting command. Luckily I had done this type of thing in the past - so it was not too difficult. I still think that someone only used to a graphical user interface would have found this much more difficult to work out.But I guess, such a person would have been always able to ask the support team for the right parameters if their first attempt did not succeed.On the whole I think that this is a good product with reasonable support from the team. I am glad I bought the drive, and would buy another product from this supplier.
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