My laptop was running out of space between work/games/school/etc, and I needed a big hard drive to keep all of my movies/shows/videos, and to be able to move/transfer/play them from somewhere else easily. This has worked perfectly for that so far. It's no flash drive, but it's portable enough to be able to put in a backpack and take wherever I need. Plug+play, and haven't really noticed any lag in the folders like I have with other WD Elements HDD's I've bought before, and it's been a year since I bought this. 3.5/4.5 TB used so far without issues, doesn't even make much noise/heat up a ton like others. If you need to hoard a bunch of data or have a lot of shows/movies you want all on one big drive, then this is a great option. Simple and effective, relatively cheap too. Would definitely recommend!

Worked Great on a brand new 2022 MacBook Pro with the M1 Pro Chip. It's amazing how cheap HDDs are now. I will continue buying them until the price of external SDDs goes down. You can literally get twice as much storage capacity with HDDs for half the price of a SSD. As always, with external drives used to do backups on Mac computers, you must reformat the disk before doing the backup and this WD is no different. Reformatting is a very easy task as always, and it takes no more than a few minutes to get the external drive ready for your Mac. However, I ran into some issues with Time Machine on the newest version of Monterey (the one that came installed in the laptop). It seems like it no matter what format you choose when reformatting the external drive, Time Machine automatically reformats the drive on its own to the new Apple File System (APFS) when you do your first backup. Not only that, but once Time Machine reformats the drive to APFS and completes the backup, then it blocks the HDD and you cannot use it to save anything else in it, drop files, etc. It basically locks the drive for backups only. Oh, and with the APFS format you cannot use the drive to backup older Apple computers. I NEVER had this happened in any of my Apple computers before. I tried a few other HDDs from other brands to ensure this was not an issue of the WD brand. They all did the same, so I knew it was an Apple software glitch issue. It took several calls to Apple to figure out that yes, Time Machine does this. The only way around this issue is to create a "new volume" in the external HDD. Then you can use the separate volume to save other things, drop files, etc. You could create as many volumes as you can, and the APFS makes it very easy. When you plug the HDD, the volume for the backup pops on your desktop (Time Machine color), along with any other volumes you created (yellow color). Hope this saves somebody out there a lot of frustration and aggravation trying to figure out what the issue with Time Machine and external drives using the newest Monterey version. I also hope Apple fixes this problem. It makes no sense that you select a specific reformat option but then Time Machine ignores it and reformats to APFS against your wish and block the drive in the process. The WD external drive works great. It is a really great value for 2TBs of storage, and it is a very small and lightweight drive. All the issues mentioned are specific to the Apple operating system that would happen with any HDD of any brand.

I have bought several of these external drives for use on multiple Xboxes, laptops, and desktops. They have never failed on me over many years even when being transported often from home to office to trains, planes, and automobiles. For the price, they can't be beat. This latest purchase was for use on my new GMKTech n97 mini-pc that is running my Plex Media Server.

TL;dr – it works great. Treat it with respect, be prepared to toss the cable it comes with (because they fail) and enjoy a huge amount of storage for a reasonable amount of money. You’ve probably read a ton of reviews on external drives and have arrived here. I’ve been in the tech biz over 44 years and was there when 128Kbyte 8” floppy disks were considered advanced. I’ve used a LOT of different drives. Let’s put this drive into perspective: it is NOT a “portable drive”, it’s an external drive that you can choose to move from place to place. AS WITH ALL SUCH DRIVES, it contains precision moving parts; if you drop it, it will likely break. If you move it around when it’s operating, it probably won’t like it. If you drop your laptop, it will likely break. If you want an external drive that you can really move around, get an SSD. I purchased one of these drives for cloud-storage and archival purposes. Simply put, I needed somewhere to dump large data collections for essentially read-only access as well as having a buffer area for cloud storage synchronization purposes (lots of r/w access to the drive). It worked so well I purchased another and might even get a 3rd. Cloud storage is great for frequently accessed data, but for your video collection, your vast music collection or the 130GB of pictures your spouse took last month, you might want off-line storage. This is a great choice. Is it fast? Slower than an SSD but faster than many external hard drives out there. If you want speed, use the local SSD in your device or get an external SSD drive. If you don’t want that expense, this is still a great drive. In operation the drive is whisper quiet and runs slightly warm. You may have read about the “click of death”, well, yeah, it happened to me too. It won’t run on an overloaded unpowered USB hub (click, click due to lack of power). The cable it comes with is frankly troublesome and honestly you should invest in a replacement. Yup, click, click, click because the cable failed (fortunately I had another to hand, doesn’t everyone?). All that will happen with other drives too, so it’s nothing unusual. My system: Win10 Pro and Win10 Home on Lenovo, Surface Books and Surface Pro; works out of the box just fine. For those complaining that the drive doesn’t work with some backup software; that’s not the drives fault. For those complaining about the speed for gaming purposes, that’s not the drives’ fault either, you should have purchased an SSD. Yes, it will work with Onedrive; just create a junction from your Onedrive folder to the required folder in the external drive. mklink /J srcFolder destFolder Since you have a large capacity drive for large data sets, robocopy (part of Windows) will be your friend as well as mklink to create junctions from your main drive to connection points in external drives filesystems. What happens if the drive goes down? As with any other drive, you might have lost your data. The solution is to (gasp) purchase two drives and sync one with the other. Pro’s: 5TB of storage for <$100. Quiet, fast and gets the job done. It’s a disk drive, it’s not there to be exciting. Con’s: I didn’t like the cable; invest $6 on a better one. As with ALL DRIVES, you need to treat it nicely.

I recently purchased the WD 4TB Elements Portable USB 3.0 High Capacity Hard Drive and I am extremely satisfied with my purchase. The drive is compact and easy to use - just plug it into my computer's USB port and I'm good to go. The 4TB of storage is more than enough for my needs, and the transfer speeds are reasonable for a standard 5400rpm HDD.. One thing that initially concerned me was the drive's tendency to get hot during use. However, I have used it extensively over the past few weeks and have not experienced any issues with overheating. In terms of value, I believe the WD 4TB Elements Portable USB 3.0 High Capacity Hard Drive offers excellent value for the price and the high capacity and decent transfer speeds make it well worth the investment. If you need a lot of storage on the go and are looking for a reliable and high-performance option, I highly recommend the WD 4TB Elements Portable USB 3.0 High Capacity Hard Drive.

Utilisateur, depuis plusieurs décennies, d’informatique et par voie de conséquence de disques durs ; dans cette catégorie, je considère les WD comme le top des disques « classiques » à plateaux. Leur fiabilité et leur durée de vie sont parmi les meilleures du marché ( je n’ai jamais eu un disque dur WD crashé !). Cette version « Elements » est compacte, légère et silencieuse, et ne nécessite pas, comme les gros disques 3.5 pouces, d’alimentation externe. Commandé et reçu très vite (Bravo et merci Amazon pour le service). L’emballage du disque est parfaitement d’origine, scellé et protégé, accompagné d’une notice et du câble USB 3. Ce type , micro B, étant surtout utilisé avec ce type de disque dur, je recommande de le laisser connecté en permanence au disque, ce qui évitera de l’endommager. Sitôt reçu, testé : Déjà formaté en NTFS Windows, il y a juste à le brancher. Attention, si destiné au MAC, il faudra le formater par le MAC avec l’utilitaire disque si on ne l’utilise qu’avec un MAC. Si destiné à être utilisé à la fois sur PC et sur MAC, il faudra un logiciel de « conversion NTFS » sur le MAC (comme Paragon ou Tuxera) et le laisser en NTFS (c’est ce que je fais). Les tests : vérification état du disque avec outil Windows, du SMART avec AIDA, et des vitesses avec CrystalDiskInfo. Tous les tests sont OK, on voit que le disque n’a été allumé que 2 fois, ce qui prouve le contrôle des disques après fabrication (NB : made in Thailand et non China !). Pour la vitesse en USB3, les valeurs sont de 120 MB/s, ce qui est très correct. J’ai sauvegardé 580 Go de photos en 3 heures, en silence total et sans échauffement important. Je voudrais ici, apporter quelques informations complémentaires, contre-vérités destinées à certains utilisateurs insatisfaits, notamment concernant les capacités de ces disques. J’ai vraiment l’impression que certains « découvrent » les disques durs externes ! Il ne s’agit en aucune façon de tromperies, mensonges ou arnaques. Il faut simplement savoir qu’il s’agit d’une différence de langage et de mathématiques ! Tous les fabricants de disques ( classiques, SSD, clés USB…) comptent la capacité en DECIMAL ( Base 10 ). Un Téraoctet (To) est l’équivalent de 1 000 000 000 000 octets. Les programmes, comme les système d’exploitation, cas de WINDOWS, utilisent les système de numérotation binaire ( Base 2) . Dans ce système, 1 To est équivalent à 1 099 511 627 776 octets. En fait, les 2 équivalent à la même capacité réelle. C’est comme si on mesurait une distance en Km et en Miles : les valeurs sont différentes, mais la distance réelle est la même. Pour les usagers MAC, les valeurs sont bien indiquées en décimal, Base 10, ce qui fait que la capacité donnée par le fabricant se retrouve réellement sur le MAC. C’est surtout Windows qui aurait dû modifier son « Go » dans l’unité standardisée en 1998 : le Kilo Binaire. Exemple : Un Gibioctet (Gio) = 1 073 741 824 octets Un Tébioctet (Tio) = 1 099 511 627 776 octets Si cela avait été modifié en Gio et Tio, il n’y aurait plus d’interrogation et de doute. En fait, si on regarde dans les « Propriétés » des disques la valeur en octets est donnée et correspond bien à la capacité du disque. Pour confirmer ceci, par exemple un fichier de 25 Mo sur MAC, devient 23,4 Mo sous windows. Autres bizarreries dans les commentaires : Une dizaine de films enregistrés, remplissent complètement un disque de 5 To. Cela semble impossible, car si on prend les plus gros films en 4K UltraHD+ BluRay, ils font au maxi 90 Go. Soit environ 1 To la dizaine !! on est loin de la saturation. Egalement, quand je lis « impossible de formater en FAT32 un disque de 4 To…… bien sûr que cela n’est pas possible , ce système est limité dèjà à moins de 4 Go pour les fichiers. Il faut être en NTFS ou en ExFAT, qui n’ont pas les mêmes limites. Je fais généralement peu de commentaires sur ce que j’achète, mais au vu de ces commentaires « négatifs » je souhaitais intervenir. Je n’ai aucun lien avec WD et autres fabricants, mais j’utilise pas mal de disques ou autres procédés de stockage, mais tous sont des fabricants reconnus et fiables. En résumé, ce disque de grande capacité est d’un excellent rapport qualité/prix et mérite ces 5 étoiles. Je suis souvent étonné que certains mettent 4 étoiles et qq fois 3, alors que leur commentaire est positif. A partir du moment où un produit réuni TOUTES les qualités attendues : Livraison, emballage, utilisation, fiabilité, etc SANS réserves, il n’ y a pas lieu de mettre autre chose que 5 étoiles. Désolé d’avoir été un peu long, mais le sujet en valait la peine.

Ótimo HD. Conforme o anunciado

This is a great hard drive. I previously had a 1 TB hard drive of WD and that worked really fine. That is why I decided to go for a 2TB hard drive of WD. Though, Seagate hard drives are much better than WD because they are thinner and they sustain for a long time like WD. I purchased it @Rs. 5599. Pros- 1. WD is a very reliable name in the field of hard drives. So it is reliable. 2. 2-year warranty. 3. small in size. 4. Reading speed is amazing. I got around 150 MBps/ 1.2 Mbps while reading. (Data was a movie and USB port was USB 3.0) 5. Writing speed is also great. I got around 55 MBps/ 440 Mbps while writing on the hard drive. (Data was a movie and USB port was USB 3.0) 6. The speed of reading and writing on USB 2.0 ports is also great. 7. USB 3.0 cable is already included in the package. So you don't need to purchase a USB 3.0 cable separately. 8. The length of the cable is enough for normal usage. 9. The product is original. So you can get is registered on WD website. You will also get your warranty from there. 10. Cheaper than Seagate models. (in general) Cons- 1. If you are in need of a long USB 3.0 cable then you will be disappointed. The length of the cable is just enough for normal usage. 2. The hard drive is somewhat thick. You will get a Seagate hard drive of the same capacity to be slimmer. Final comment- If the price is not a big issue for you and you want a slimmer hard drive then go for Seagate hard drive. Else this is certainly one of the best choices.

Works well