WD 4TB Elements Portable External Hard Drive for Windows, USB 3.2 Gen 1/USB 3.0 for PC & Mac, Plug and Play Ready - ‎WDBU6Y0040BBK-WESN

I've used WD portable external HDD's for over 10 years as a backup in my personal and small office computer systems as a back up media. These are terrific, they just keep working and working and working! Small, easy to attach via cable and fast too. The capacity keeps getting larger over time which is good as we keep storing more files over time as well. The size of these is pretty small, I can easily fit them in my briefcase to take home with me. We keep one off site at all times so we always have a backup that is safe in case of any calamity.

We bought the REFURBISHED 4TB version of this hard drive. The description says the drive may come with small imperfections, missing manuals, and original packaging. We found no cosmetic damage whatsoever. The drive also comes with a USB-A adapter for connections. After connecting it to a PC, the drive does come with WD software installed, but a quick reformat will empty it completely.I recommend installing CrystalDiskInfo (if on Windows) to check drive health. Ours had only been on for 6 hours, so we got a basically BRAND NEW hard drive at 2/3ths of the price. The product works fantastic and there are no compatibility issues with Windows or Mac. Read/Write speed is great and it is perfect for dumping all our photos into a portable box the size of a phone.While there may not be much that differentiates it from its competitors, I highly recommend this product for its price, portability, and value.

Shipped quickly and was packaged well. This is an attractive and lightweight external drive so it would work well in a portable drive situation.But, I bought this to backup my Synology NAS drive. So easy to use. I just plugged it into the NAS which recognized it and formatted it. Then set up my backup program. All done. Probably 15 minutes total (most of that was waiting for the formatting to complete).Very happy to have. Backups are quick and allows some extra security for my files. RAID, while fast and normally secure, can fail. When it does it is catastrophic because of the immense amount of data it holds. A failure in a RAID 5 system about 8 years ago drove this home. While no data was lost it took a stressful week to restore the data. I now use RAID 6 (dual drive redundancy) but this drive adds an extra level of security and redundancy to the system.Cheap large and functional, this drive is great.

GOING STRONG AND SAVED ME WHEN MY IMAC HAD A MELTDOWN CAUSED BY AN UNEXPERIENCED APPLE TECH SUPPORT. I BACK UP DAILY AND WAS ABLE TO GO BACK A DAY TO RESTORE MY MAIL AND PHOTOS THAT THE TECH PERSON SCREWED ALL UP. QUIET, WORKS IN THE BACKGROUND. I HAVE GONE THRU 6 OR 7 DRIVES OVER THE YEARS, THIS ONE IS GOOD SO FAR. I'VE HAD IT AWHILE.

I have 7 of these of various sizes, 1, 4, & 5 TB.I like their size, their quiet operation, their price, and easy set up.I use 2 of them for Time Machine backups on Mac, where they each incrementally backup alternating hourly. Four of the others I use to do larger chunk backups once every 2 weeks. The seventh one is one that is failing.Five of my seven show 100% Health on my DriveDx disc analysis software. One of seven failed after a couple of years of use with 187 "pending sector count" problems. The other has been in use only about a year and has 6 "pending sector count" issues. (Drives with sector count issues are 16 times more likely to fail within 60 days than those with 0 sector count problems.)So 5 ÷ 7 is about 70%. I've gotten 5 years out of 5 of them, 2 years out of 1, and only 1 year out of the newest. Hence 4 stars.Overall, I'd recommend them. I've just ordered more of these as replacement for the "6 pending sector count" one, and two new ones to setup a new backup system for my wife's computer. I figure due to losses, I add 30% $$ to make up for the failure rate/replacement cost to give me the cost per stable unit.

Easy and Fast - just copy files. Reliable. Second one I have ordered.

Nice product works as advertised and I'm happy

I just wanted to report my experience for a very specific use case: using this for Frigate NVR recordings.I have a Frigate NVR VM running in ProxMox (i3-14100). Plugged the drive in (went for a USB-C cable), and used USB pass-through. Formatted the main partition with ext4, and mounted at the storage/recordings directory. Moving the old recordings over (was on NVMe) at around 95MB/s. During normal operation, with 15 cameras recording, I see about 5MB/s being written to the USB drive.Overall, very happy with this setup. I didn't have any spare SATA ports, 4 used for a RAID-5 array (as my main NAS server) and I didn't want the recordings constantly spinning up that array - so I decided on a USB powered external drive just for recordings. I also have an NVMe drive for the VM storage, which was working fine, but I also had a slight concern regarding TBW (I have almost 20 cameras all recording). If there are issues with bandwidth, I'll post a follow-up.