He carries things every day. On an Xbox One, the drive was recognized immediately once plugged and once formatted by the game console, I could use it to store games, apps and content for playback. But curiously, another choice comes from another line at Western Digital, the Elements Desktop Drive. This method has shortcomings: For one, people are more likely to post a review when they have a problem. The 8 TB My Book is just as reliable as our top pick, and it was about as fast in our Blu-ray and HD Tune tests, but about 4 minutes slower in our Time Machine testing. It is 4.3 x 3.2 x 0.6 inches. Apart from Windows and Mac computers, where the Elements worked without any issues, I also tried it with a few non-computer hosts; it proved to be compatible there as well. It was about as fast as the competition in all of our tests, it’s the least expensive drive we tested at this writing, and it has a longer warranty (three years) than the other contenders. WD Elements 6TB USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drive Black - Newegg.com High capacity in a compact design. The Element doesn't require anything from the host at all, other than a USB port. Also, in my opinion, the Elements is slightly better-looking. You can also use WD Drive Utilities to check for potential drive failures, major performance problems, and bad sectors on the My Book. We found the speed differences between them to be small: All but one of our finalists performed within about 20 seconds of one another when transferring a Blu-ray movie, and all completed a Time Machine backup within 4 minutes of one another. Using the included WD Discovery app, you can import your data from a cloud storage or social media account to your drive. Like our top pick, the higher-capacity WD My Book has a low, 6 percent reported failure rate (judging from Amazon reviews), and it performed the best of the three 8 TB options we tested. The WD Elements Portable drive is an excellent alternative to the Seagate Expansion. The WD My Book Desktop Hard Drive. To spot any widespread reliability issues, we read through Amazon reviews for each of the drives we tested, and we counted the number of reported drive failures. At the time of our research, the Seagate Backup Plus Hub for Mac was around $30 more expensive than the regular Seagate Backup Plus Hub we tested (and $40 more than our top pick). In our … For anyone who still needs an optical drive, the Asus ZenDrive U9M is the best DVD-only option, and the LG BP60NB10 is the best choice for Blu-ray discs. If you want us to review it drop us a line and we might just bump it to the front of our reviews queue. Buy it on Amazon: https://amzn.to/2YxmzPlMy Setup Gear: https://amzn.to/35mYQpXThis WD 4TB portable hard drive is one the best in the market! About 5 percent of drives fail in the first 18 months of use, with the failure rate dipping to about 1.5 percent for another 18 months. It outperformed the WD My Book in most of our tests, but it costs nearly $20 more as of this writing. It’s a rather bizarre design with half of the … Wirecutter has researched and recommended hard drives since early 2012, and our PC team has over eight years of combined experience testing hard drives and solid-state drives—as your guide, I’ve spent the past two years reviewing hard drives and portable SSDs, too. 5.0 out of 5 stars Had a WD White Label drive in it. It should sit on your desk, quietly spinning away, storing and backing up your data without a lot of setup or ongoing maintenance. The drive did not get hot during our testing, and although this My Book occasionally made a low humming noise while we moved files around, we don’t think that’s cause for concern; all of the drives we tested make some noise. Since the Element houses a low-power internal drive, I didn't expect it to blow me away with its performance, but the drive did quite well in testing nonetheless. My Passport. The Element also worked well with routers and media network media players. Wirecutter video producer Hunter Boone owns the 4 TB My Book; he says that it’s been very reliable for sync and back-up, too. After a new round of testing hard drives in 2020, we found that the 2 TB Seagate Backup Plus Slim is still the best portable hard drive for most people. A desktop external hard drive is a great local backup for a computer that mostly stays parked on a desk. *At the time of publishing, the price was $101. The new SanDisk Extreme 900 Portable SSD is an extremely fast portable drive. Customers like WD Elements Desktop noticeably more WD Elements Desktop, the pricier option, tends to get more favorable reviews than Seagate Expansion Desktop Portable [ 4.6 vs 4.5 ]. However, it's fairly safe to say that WD Elements is a more popular external hard drive, based on its 80,000+ reviews… Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for WD Elements Desktop Hard Drive at Amazon.com. AVERAGE USER SCORE. Don't delete files. We delete comments that violate our policy, which we encourage you to read. In HD Tune testing, the 4 TB WD My Book had a read speed of 143.8 megabytes per second and a write speed of 138.4 MB/s, operating a little faster than most of the competition. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. While the two drives are very similar in most aspects, the Expansion is faster but the Element is cheaper. Your computer’s internal drive will stop working someday, and unless your data is backed up, it’ll be gone forever. Overview and unboxing of my WD (western digital) 6tb black hard drive. WD Elements. Neither of these research methods is a perfect indicator of the My Book’s reliability, but they are the best we have. Wirecutter is reader-supported. If the 4 TB My Book is out of stock or the price goes up, Western Digital’s 4 TB Elements is a great and dependable alternative. Read honest and unbiased product reviews from our … Although other external hard drives we tested (such as our runner-up pick) were similarly slow when writing files, none of them were as slow as the Seagate at reading them. ... Western Digital WD Elements Desktop. Justin Krajeski is a staff writer reporting on everyday carry at Wirecutter. Backup servers are a very different environment than a box on your desk: Bare drives in servers are accessed more often and are subject to more vibrations and more heat, whereas drives in desktop enclosures have more potential points of failure between the power connector, the USB connector, and the USB-to-SATA logic board. And when we backed up to the Elements with Time Machine, it was the second-fastest drive we tested, falling just behind our top pick. It performed well in Blu-ray testing against our other 8 TB options and did fine in Time Machine tests, but it was notably slow during the HD Tune test. The WD 10TB Elements Desktop Hard Drive, about $225 (order code WDBWLG0100HBK-NESN), is a USB 3.0 (backward USB 2.0 compatibility) that delivers on transfer … If the 4 TB My Book is unavailable, or if its price goes up, WD’s 4 TB Elements desktop drive is a great second choice. Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for WD 14TB Elements Desktop External Hard Drive - USB 3.0 at Amazon.com. While reading through 326 Amazon reviews of the 8 TB My Book, we found only 20 reviews—or 6 percent—that mentioned drive failure. Preformatted NTFS for systems running Windows 10, 8.1, or 7, the 10TB Elements Desktop USB 3.0 External Hard Drive from WD provides users with up to 10TB of add-on storage for their photos, … But that omission isn’t a dealbreaker because dragging and dropping files or using some other free backup program is an equally good option. If you need more storage, we recommend the Western Digital 8 TB My Book. At four years, the failure rate is 20 percent. In HD Tune tests, the Elements had a slightly slower write speed compared with our top pick, but the two models’ read speeds were even. It’s cheaper per terabyte than the other My Book models, but it still costs around $170 at this writing, so we recommend it only if you know you need that much space. Personally, I'm totally happy with the WD Elements Portable drive and have no problems recommending it to most people. Wirecutter staffers have used the WD My Book in varying capacities over the years. If you see the price on the Easystore come down, though, it’s worth buying. It has the same software as our top pick too, but its warranty is only two years—one year less than the My Book’s coverage. Judging from five years of data, Backblaze estimates that more than half of hard drives will last six years. Compared with our 8 TB pick, it was 17.4 MB/s slower in the HD Tune read test, and 31.2 MB/s slower in the write test. But overall, these were average speeds for USB 3.0 portable drives, fast enough for all applications that require external storage, including movie playback, backup and app storage. It also comes with a longer warranty than the other 8 TB options we tested, three years of coverage. Be respectful, keep it civil and stay on topic. They’re more expensive per terabyte than bigger desktop models, and they’re a bit slower, but portable hard drives are smaller and lighter than desktop drives and don’t need an additional power adapter. Although Toshiba’s 4 TB Canvio for Desktop is a great desktop hard drive, it’s quite expensive. After narrowing our list of finalists by price and capacity, we tested four 4 TB desktop hard drives and three 8 TB models. The Elements is about as fast as our top pick: In our tests, its average write speed was 7.7 MB/s slower, and it took about 5 seconds longer to transfer a Blu-ray film, but those differences were within the margin of error. (In addition, you can use it to permanently erase all the data on your drive.) For each one, we ran HD Tune Pro, a benchmarking program that tests transfer speeds and access time across the entire disk. The 8 TB My Book performed well in our HD Tune read and write tests, with results of 134 MB/s and 139.9 MB/s, respectively. We haven’t found any new desktop hard drives worth testing in late 2019, but we did collect another round of long-term test notes from our staff for the WD My Book and the WD Elements. In our Blu-ray transfer tests, the 8 TB WD My Book was quick—it read a large Blu-ray video file in 4 minutes, 28 seconds and wrote that file in 4 minutes, 27 seconds. You should consider replacing your backup drives between the third and sixth year of use. If you spend most of your time working at one desk, you should get a desktop external drive. The WD Easystore is available in both 4 TB and 8 TB capacities. It’s also less expensive than the other 8 TB drives we tested, and it has the longest warranty. Read honest and unbiased product reviews from our users. Ideally, an external hard drive is something you don’t notice much. Right now, that means the 4 TB WD My Book. Here are some of the best Netflix has to offer. Transparent OLED: See-through TV comes to tomorrow's beds, restaurants, subways, The all-digital CES continues on Tuesday, here's how you can watch it all on CNET, CNET Labs' USB 3.0 external drive performance, Twitter permanently suspends Trump's account, Why now is the worst time to buy the Samsung Galaxy S20, Discuss: WD Elements Portable drive review: Large, affordable and versatile, Windows XP or later; Mac OS 10.4 or later. Improve PC performance. The Seagate Expansion Desktop was significantly slower than our top picks when we tested it in late 2016. The WD Elements range provides reliable high capacity storage with USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 compatibility. It only weighs 4.8oz. It’s a reliable drive, although it isn’t quite as fast as our top pick. After 20 hours of new research and testing, we found that the best external desktop hard drive for most people is Western Digital’s 4 TB My Book. “When I’m done with video projects that aren’t that important to me—but I want to keep the original videos so I can eventually add them to my reel—it’s a great tool to free up some space on my Thunderbolt-editing drives.”, Wirecutter senior editor Nathan Edwards has owned the 6 TB version of the drive for more than a year, and he says: “It's quieter than my old backup drive and relatively good-looking. Finally, we timed how long each external hard drive took to back up with Time Machine on a 2016 MacBook Pro. Western Digital’s 4 TB My Book is the best desktop hard drive for most people because it’s reliable and it offers the best balance of speed and price. Most of the drives we tested performed similarly, with the 4 TB WD My Book having a slight edge in most of our tests. The 8 TB Seagate Backup Plus Hub faced problems similar to those of the 4 TB model. The My Book is reliable, fast, and less expensive than the other desktop drives we tested, plus it has enough space for your future storage needs and a long, three-year warranty. On top of that, it's fairly safe to say that WD Elements Desktop is a more popular external hard drive, based on its 5,000+ reviews… But if you frequently move between locations, a portable external drive is the better choice. (We recommend the similarly performing WD 8 TB Easystore if it’s the same price as—or cheaper than—the 8 TB My Book. Many suffered from limited availability, too. Although prices on hard drives fluctuate frequently, our pick was the least expensive in its competitive field: At the time, it cost around $96, or $24 per terabyte, while the majority of the drives we tested cost more than $100. About half the drives we tested for this update are new, so they didn’t have many Amazon reviews. The Elements drives are focused on portability, stripping away the bulky enclosures and power supplies of desktop hard drives in favor of a slim form factor. Backblaze’s 2017 report notes that WD’s 4 TB drives had a low, 2.2 percent annualized failure rate. The drives come with a two-year warranty and have been formatted to NTFS. Ultimately, this is a fast, easy-to-use and versatile portable drive that can effortlessly add a lot more storage, not just to computers but also game consoles and other types of USB-enabled hosts. Brian Beach, How long do disk drives last?, Backblaze, November 12, 2013, Andy Klein, Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2017, Backblaze, February 1, 2018, Lyle Smith, WD My Book Review, StorageReview.com, October 11, 2016, Dong Ngo, WD My Book (Fall 2016) review, CNET, October 11, 2016. A step-by-step guide to formatting your external hard drive, and what file systems are best for Windows File History and macOS Time Machine. We also looked at Backblaze’s hard drive reliability ratings from 2017, which are based on more than 90,000 drives the company uses in its cloud backup servers. According to statistics from cloud backup service Backblaze, hard drives are most likely to fail either within the first 18 months of use or after three years. These are the features you should look for in a desktop hard drive, in rough order of importance: We also made note of drive noise and extra USB ports as we tested the external desktop hard drives. The WD Elements Desktop Hard Drive. This result was better than that for the 8 TB Seagate we tested, which had an 11 percent reported failure rate, or 62 noted failures out of 570 reviews on Amazon. The difference in transfer time wasn’t substantial in any of our tests, though, and it costs about the same as the My Book per terabyte. I don't bother it and it doesn't bother me, and my computer is backed up, so that seems good.”. But this approach is the best we have for now. You can read a more in-depth explanation of the program at the HD Tune website. This … Note that the WD Elements also works with USB 2.0 but at much slower speeds; in the neighborhood of 30MBps for both writing and reading. Here are our favorite new and old iPad games to play this year. The compact design offers up to 14TB capacity, making WD Elements desktop storage the ideal solution for easy, add-on storage of all your important photos, music, videos and files. We found just five reported failures out of 168 Amazon reviews for the Elements 4 TB option, giving this external hard drive a 3 percent failure rate. © 2021 Wirecutter, Inc., A New York Times Company, Western Digital WD Elements Desktop (4 TB), If you need more storage: WD My Book (8 TB), statistics from cloud backup service Backblaze, The Best External Optical Drives for DVDs and Blu-rays. Because the two drives appeared to be the same otherwise, we dismissed them. Wirecutter lead software engineer Justin Yost told us that his wife has the 4 TB version of our top pick; she uses it as a back-up drive, and it’s been fine for the past year or so. One Wirecutter staffer wasn’t able to figure out how to format their drive. The Easystore was about 2 minutes faster in this test. Other drives from G-Tech, LaCie, OWC, and Transcend were too expensive, ranging from $140 to $420 for 4 TB models—1.4 to 4.2 times as much as our top pick. The Elements is about as reliable as the 4 TB My Book. If you don't plan on using it to store sensitive data, this is an excellent drive to choose. He previously wrote about tech at Wirecutter. It’s a reliable drive, although it isn’t quite as fast as our top pick. Not sure what to watch on Amazon tonight? They’re also designed to withstand a little more abuse (although one bump can still lead to failure). If you’re not backing up the important documents and photos on your computer, you should start. The 8 TB Easystore had a mere 1.25 percent reported failure rate on Best Buy’s site—34 noted failures out of 2,708 reviews—but these results aren’t directly comparable because they’re from different retailers with different demographics and customer review systems. Most of the drives performed similarly in these tests, except for the 4 TB Seagate Backup Plus Hub, which was notably slower. Also, because of the limited information available in some reviews, it can be hard to differentiate between hardware failures and software issues or user errors that could cause problems with a drive. Every hard drive we tested is adequate for the task of backing up your computer; only minor differences in speed, price, warranty, and included software differentiate them. If the 4 TB My Book is unavailable, or if its price goes up, WD’s 4 TB Elements desktop drive is a great second choice. If this is an issue you’re facing, too, check out our instructions on how to do this. Discussion threads can be closed at any time at our discretion. The WD Elements has a two-year warranty, one year less than our top pick, and it doesn’t come with any backup software. So WD Elements Desktop, while being a pricier option, tends to get more favorable ⭐ reviews than the $45 WD Elements, as seen on the chart below.