WDWD 2TB Elements Portable External Hard Drive for Windows, USB 3.2 Gen 1/USB 3.0 for PC & Mac, Plug and Play Ready - WDBU6Y0020BBK-WESN

Great, sturdy and performant.Works very well at the moment. I feel it is more durable than my other 7tb+ hard disks. Would buy it again. Price is justified for the quality

Good price-to-capacity ratio (purchased during Prime sale). The drive makes pretty significant thumping movement and sound at power up and also thumps every few seconds at times due to the preventive wear leveling feature. It is quite a bit distracting when you first encounter it -- I was originally thinking about returning the drive -- but after a few days, the periodic thumping has diminished and is no longer bothersome.Performance seems pretty good - I am getting an average 1.7 Gb/sec (~200 MB/sec) writes doing backups (it was as high as 2.5 Gb/sec when I first started using the drive and it was largely empty).It is quite satisfying to have ongoing backups that can now reach back a few months.

When I was doing research on external hard drives to use with PS3, this one popped up in a forum. The high capacity is really nice but PS3 externals use MBR partitions, which usually limit the HDD to 2tb of usable space.This drive, when using the WD Quick Format Tool, actually allows for all 5tb to be usable. When using the format utility be sure to select Windows XP compatibility.It feels like a solid enclosure that adequately protects, doesn't overheat, and transfer speeds are fine. Not ssd speeds, but good for the use case. It's basically plug and play. Recommended for a good storage solution.

I bought this a couple of years ago because I was tired of moving things to a flash drive in order to free up space on my laptop and trying to remember what flash drive has what files. This is simple plug and play. I have it connected to a USB port extender and there is no noticeable latency when accessing files and unlike other external drives that I have used it is completely silent. I moved everything from all of my flash drives onto it and now instead of saving files to the laptop I save it on the external drive. I have files that date back over 20 years and I still have plenty of space left, over half of the total drive space. When I bought a new laptop I didn't have to spend time moving my files, I just moved the drive. This being a piece of computer equipment it will eventually fail. When that happens I will definitely buy another one. But for right now I love it.

I recently upgraded my MAC and needed a larger drive for my TIME MACHINE backups. Since my past experience with WD drives has always been good, I got this one. I cannot speak for future reliability, but based on my experience with the other WD drives, some I still use a few years later, I am not anticipating any issues. It is not a huge drive, so easy to hide away near your computer, if you're on desktop. I would not want to carry this around, but it i snot so big that you could't if you wanted to.However, this drive is NOT plug and play for MAC (hence my four stars). But formatting it for MAC is very easy. The main thing is: DO NOT -- and I repeat DO NOT -- install the software that comes with the drive. As others have stated, it creates nothing but issues and you do not really need it. To this day, I have never used it with any of my WD drives. Here is what you do:1) Plug the drive. Your MAC will recognize it as 'Elements.'2) Go to your Applications folder and open UTILITIES, then DISK UTILITIES.3) Find the 'Elements' drive on the left side of the window and select it. Then, on top of the window click ERASE.4) Another dropdown window will open, asking you to choose a format. For newer MACS choose the first item on the list: APFS. It will also ask you to NAME your drive. Do so. Then, proceed to erase. Your MAC will do the rest.If you're setting this up for TIME MACHINE, another window will open after your drive is formatted and mounted, asking if you want to use this drive for that purpose. Proceed from there. Otherwise, your drive will already be mounted on your desktop and ready for your use. That's it. Takes less than 5 minutes.My only gripe about this drive is it needs to be plugged in. The rest is fine.

This Western Digital 8tb drive is replacement for a 10 year old WD drive that started to fail. As always this new drive works great, and handles all of the functions of my primary computer system backup. The data transfer speed is great for a disc based system and I prefer the quality of WD over other disc based external backup hard drives.