WD 20TB Elements Desktop External Hard Drive, USB 3.0 external hard drive for plug-and-play storage - WDBWLG0200HBK-NESN

My old WD 8TB disk died at Christmas and I ordered one of these from Best Buy. I took it home to reformat, and it would not format to the new APFS required for current systems. Took it back and BB said they would reformat it. Took it home and was able to load data, but unable to retrieve data. Tried to get back to Geek specialist, but could not be connected due to holidays. Called Apple support and nothing we did took care of the issue. Returned the drive to BB, who did not have another drive. Ordered from Amazon, had the same reformatting issue so went to Apple Support Community who told me what the problem was. Said to ignore WD software, as it is useless but to order a 3rd party app. I bought NFTS for Mac and was finally able to use it as designed.

16TB with14tb usable how do they keep getting away with false claims????

in terms of dollars per gigabyte, at the time I purchased these, the 12 TB was the best value. Assuming that you are not substantially space constrained (shelf space). With these high density drives reliability is always a primary concern too. they really push the boundaries of what is feasible as they continue to push the capacity higher and higher. Which is why for a long time I avoided such monsters. But these have been around for long enough now that I feel more comfortable buying them. I used a program called BADBLOCKS and let it run tests continuously for about 5 days (every sector read/write multiple times) before deciding to put these bad boys into use. One of the big problems with these high capacity drives is the amount of time that it takes to move data in and out of them. So I was very happy to see that they have increased the throughput to a sustained 200 Megabytes per second Read/Write. Of course actual access times vary due to many factors but on large files USB3 that is what I was seeing. So Really Happy About That. There is an endless debate about which is better (more reliable) Seagate or Western Digital. I have found WD to be very reliable, I cant tell you which one is more reliable But I tend to avoid Seagate because some of their drives are/were very slow for me. Only time will tell about the ultimate reliability, but these passed my tests with flying colors and I have some WD 8TB drives that are about 4 years old without any problems. (Im only using these drives for backups so not super stressing them). Remember folks.... You need to make at least two copies of everything ( 2 drives) and if it is something that you really care about then make 3 copies and take one offsite. I have seen far too many horror stories of people whos backups failed for various reasons. These drives will get the job done.

Sleek and easy to use

If your purpose of buying this drive is to Shuck(remove it from its enclosure to use as internal drive) I would recommend you do at least a s.m.a.r.t check with windows command line chkdsk while its still enclosed to see if it came bad out of the box because you will void warranty, so you cant send it back after you shuck it and find a bad drive in the enclosure. Both my 6TB and 8TB came with WD white label WDC WD80EDAZ models. Strangely enough my 6TB did not require the 3.3 volt pin mod in order to be recognized by windows but my 8TB did, I bought them about a couple month apart so who knows if they changed it. I also want to note that even after the 3.3 volt pin mod on my 8TB, it was still not showing up in windows. Showed up as a strange size in EaseUS partition manager but was hidden in Windows disk manager but was visible in Diskpart in cmd. I want to stress that even with the mod it took a fair bit of noodling to get it to work in windows. I had to erase the partition via the enclosure connected then mod it, than connected it via sata and sata power(I also tried creating a partition in ANOTHER enclosure because my pc was too messy and large for me to mess with currently but ended up having to anyways to get it to work). Still didnt show up until I ran diskpart in cmd to see if it saw it, it did but then had to run clean command before it let me erase or create any partitions with it. This wasnt as simple as some reddit posts or youtube videos made it out to be. So just a fair bit of warning to anyone who hasnt done this before, its doable just more work than youd expect, if youve done some troubleshooting in the past i believe you would be able to handle the process. The most annoying would be the 3.3 volt mod as that required a bit more finesse with chubby fingers and poor eye sight. Some say you need to cover the one pin but i saw others mention that you can cover the remaining pins with no issue so i went that route, it made it easier to cut and cover with electrical tape and scissors. The drive itself. The 8TB runs pretty damn hot outside of the enclosure, temperature was 50-55C, laying bare on the wood table while i was copying about 3.5 TB of data to it about nine hours process, I cant imagine how hot it runs INSIDE the enclosure it came in(the enclosure does not have any fans only air gaps for it to exhaust). When i stuck it in my case with a lot of airflow, 2 140 fans front intake hitting the drive directly, they ran at 28-30C. A lot more reasonable. I dont really care about the speed I just want reliable storage to hold all my data backups and it seems ok, will edit if it fails within a few months etc. The temp it was running at bare kind of sucks so your mileage will vary. Currently copying data to it so cant do a speed test, you can probably find another review posting speed so look at their review for that. What an annoyance to get this thing running, but the savings was worth it I guess.

Ive had this drive for around a year now. It continues to perform great. I have decided to purchase 2 more since they are so reliable. The read/write speeds are reasonable and I have never received an error. I currently have this 12 TB and 2 5 TB drives hooked to my Lennox tower. I am running the current version of Windows 10.

Bought it because I do a lot of video recording and I needed space. I was practically able to move my entire computer over onto this device and I still have enough space to do it about 6 more times. Very good as a backup source of room with the added knowledge that if your computer blows whatever is on there is safe. The unit is also quiet. I dont hear it at all over my desktop.

Great product. I have no complaints.

I purchased this drive in January of 2020. I bought mine with a 10 terabyte capacity. In terms of portability, it does require A.C power so keep that in mind when you are traveling. However, if you are somebody that needs to have access to a large amount of data or have space for large amounts of data at any given time, then you really cant do much better than this drive. For the price, you are getting a great value with these drives. From disassembly videos, it seems that most of this elements contain Western Digital Red drives. To buy just that hard drive (at an equal storage size as an Elements) it is actually cheaper to buy the Elements than it is to just buy the Red hard drive with no enclosure. When doing data transfers, the drive is fast. Ive gotten nearly a true 5gps transfer speed when copying large files. If I had to guess, I would say the drive inside runs at about 5400 or 5600 rpm. While its not as fast as 7200 or an SSD drive, im guessing that it will have a longer longevity than faster hard disk drives. The only time the slower rotation speed becomes a bother is when you havent accessed the drive for about a half hour. It seems to have an idle mode where it is on standby. When you go back to the drive to access information, it takes about 20 seconds for it to wake back up and get back up to speed. Its not really a problem if you are constantly reading and writing information, but it can be a small nuisance when accessing it intermittently. Long Story short, if you are looking for a drive that has a very large storage capacity, is relatively portable, and is cheap, then look no further. Are there better and faster drives out there? Yes. They also cost more. I have used this drive for video editing and have actively edited movies off of this drive with footage up to 2k resolution with no problem. The main option you are probably comparing this to is the My Book which is also made by Western Digital. The only difference with that drive is that it comes with encryption software, and allows the drive to be accessed by a network. If you need network access then the choice is clear, but if you want the My Book for the encryption software, be aware there are hundreds of other encryption programs available (some of them are free and actually work very well), and purchasing the My Book for that option is sort of a waste of money. If you just need a drive for the storage capacity and nothing else, then this drive is for you.

Many reviews complain that the drive doesnt have 18T, but only 16.3T. Its both. Hard drive manufacturers give terabytes not in computer terabytes (T, 2^40 = 1099511627776 bytes each), but in SI terabytes (t, 10^12 = 1000000000000 bytes each). Thats because some hard drive manufacturer started doing that once way back, so they could make their hard drives sound like they were bigger than they were, and the consumers were fooled, so every hard drive manufacturer had to start doing it. So it really is an 18t drive, but thats only 16.37T of space. But NTFS drives cant be initialized with compression enabled if theyre bigger than 16.0T. If you initialize your whole 16.37T hard drive with NTFS, you cant enable compression, and not having compression will cost you more than 0.37T of space. So using Windows, you should shrink the partition on this hard drive to 16T before initializing it. The bottom line is that 16.37T is not a sensible partition size; its worse than having just 16T. But this drive will be fine if you repartition it to 16T, and dont mind throwing away 2% of your disk space.