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

Works exactly like I would expect a Western Digital product would. Ive trusted them for years. Well worth the price.

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.

Pro - Simple White Label WD drive inside, passed stress test with no issues Con - Much more difficult to shuck than lower capacity models, power cable is quite short for anyone planning on using it as an external drive

Used or refurbished. Loud spinning noises when loading. Shakes the desk. Takes a minute to wake up from sleeping.

I bought this to replace the external hard drive connected to my dish hopper 3 after it died. Since Dish says that you have to use an externally powered usb 2.0 drive this drive checked all the boxes since it is usb 3.0 backwards compatible with 2.0 and uses its own power supply. When I connected it to my hopper a message popped up asking if I wanted to reformat the drive. I clicked yes and it did its thing. One thing to remember is that when its done it wont show up in your menu until you restart your hopper and then it will show up as an available external hard drive. I cant comment on tech support since I didnt need any or portability since its just going to sit on a shelf. I would definitely recommend this Elements drive if you want increased storage for your Dish hopper

Im a photographer and needed a storage device to work off of other than a portable hard drive which is extremely unreliable and slower than a desktop-based hard drive. With that, I ordered the 10TB WD Elements and dont know why I didnt make this purchase sooner. Its very quiet and very fast - fast enough to scan through the photos and make edits as necessary. Sure, its not as fast as an SSD but no way can you purchase (at the moment) a single SSD-based drive that holds 10TB. And even if one did exist, you are talking about a price that is potentially in the thousands of dollars. My plan is to purchase another one to use as a backup for my primary 10TB.

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.

What I use it for : Xbox Series X storage Does it work?: Oh yeah Love it. Not the first or last HD Ill buy from them. I used this to condense my Xbox storage to 1 HD instead of a few smaller ones. It works perfectly for that. Easy just plug it in and switch it on and store away. For my fellow gamers, I will add that some games are too crazy for it and you have to play them from internal storage. But thats no big deal for me. Bubba (what I named it) holds most games I own then I just copy a game to internal storage if it requires it for gameplay then delete then copy if I dont need it anymore or plan on walking away from that game for awhile. Keeps things organized and my console running smoothly. This is a rare need honestly.

The drive works. Just plug it in, turn it on, let Windows install the relevant drivers, & youre good to go. Ive had it for only a couple of days so I cant address durability. But my experience with other Western Digital equipment has been good. Theyre a reputable company for a reason. I decided I ought to be prudent & do a full format of the drive, not a quick format. It took a day. Yes, a whole 24 hours. On a USB 3 port. This is not a complaint. Its 20T. Thats a ridiculous amount of space. Format takes time. This is NOT a shortcoming of either the drive or your computer. If you do a full format, plan for it to run a long time. And any sizable backups you do to the drive will also take a long time. Dont complain about it. Expect it. Actually, the size of the drive is 20,000,553,295,872 bytes. Thats a human number. That is not actually 20T. 20T is 20 times 2 raised to the power 40. In human numbers, 2**40 is 1,099,511,627,776. 1T is not 1 trillion. They are different numbers. Drive manufacturers like to say their devices are a certain number of T. They are intentionally inflating their numbers to mystify the unsuspecting consumer. Learn. This 20T hard drive does not contain 20T of space. It is actually 20,000,553,295,872/1,099,511,627,776T, which works out to 18.19T. Windows reports it as 18,626.97G. Computers work in powers of 2. Disk drive manufacturers dont. Understand the difference. 20T is actually 21,990,232,555,520, nearly 22 trillion, larger than the manufacturers claim that the drive is 20T. Dont be fooled. Its just fun with figures.

Hello, I have recently purchased an external hard drive from Western Digital and I have to say, I have been satisfied with the product. This product is great for anyone that needs to clear space off their main storage devices or make backups of info. This device also works well as a storage option for people with an Xbox or PlayStation, as a way to store extra games. Also, its good for business settings as a way store extra files or reports. The performance to price ratio is quite good for this product. With 8TBs of storage for $ 140, the price per gigabyte is very low (~2 cents per gigabyte). Also, the build quality seems good and had no physical defects/marks. I have been using the hard drive frequently over the past month and have had no issues with overheating or data transfer issues. The read and write speeds on the hard drive are decent (for an HDD) at around 150-170 Mb/s. However, the disk does run at 5400 rpm as opposed to 7200 RPM making the product slower than other drives. But the slower RPM does mean that the disk will run cooler and in turn prolong the life of the hard drive (in theory). Another positive is the plug and play aspect of it, allowing for easy setup if you are using windows. Unfortunately, if you are on Mac OS you will have to reformat the drive before use. When running the noise of the product is noticeable but not too loud usually just the typical “whirring” noise hard drives make and the occasional data clicks. If stored in a closed area the noise isn’t that bad. It matches that of your typical computer fan. Another nice feature about this external hard drive is that it will go into sleep mode if the hard drive is not actively being used. This helps by conserving energy use and should help in prolonging the life of the hard drive. But it should be noted that it takes around 20 seconds for the drive to “wake up” after being in sleep mode so if you need to frequently be accessing flies in the drive this should be taken into consideration. As a quick summary, I would rate performance a 3.5/5, price 5/5, build quality 4/5 and reliability 4/5. Overall, I would say this is a good product if you are looking for cheap data storage, while still having the reliability that is commonly seen in Western Digital drives.