WD 4TB My Book Desktop External Hard Drive - USB 3.0 - WDBFJK0040HBK-NESN,Black

I bought this WD 3TB My Book external hard drive to transfer my giant and growing photos library off of my Apple iMac. The transfer was painless, and it updates easily when I download new photos or when backing up to my time machine. This is my second My Book. The first is three years old and Ive had no issues with it. I find this brand reliable and fairly priced. The only reason I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 is because I had to reformat it (knew this when I started) but it was not explained in the internal set up directions. Nothing a quick google search wouldnt fix, but I can imaging the more technically challenged of us would appreciate a bit more guidance up front. Quick Tip- my first reformatting attempts failed several times over. I had inadvertently opened the drive in finder on my computer, so it would not format as it was in use. I ejected and deleted all existence, plugged it back in, and it went smoothly from there.

This review is specifically for the WD 4TB My Book Desktop External Hard Drive - USB 3.0 - WDBFJK0040HBK-NESN. February 23, 2016 Saw a good price on Amazon and immediately ordered the new 4 TB model in order to make System Image backups of all my Windows systems for storage offsite (I dont trust cloud servers). Older MyBook models got occasional data errors on USB 3.0 on a Haswell-based Dell PowerEdge T20, requiring the use of an USB 2.0 port to get backups done perfectly - but not this one. The 4 TB drive runs flawlessly on USB 3.0, and gobbles up the data very quickly at WELL over 100 megabytes per second. And its virtually silent. If you want to be able to use this (or any other WD MyBook) to make Windows System Image backups on Windows 7 or newer systems, you MUST reformat the drive using the Western Digital Quick Formatter tool, which is supplied freely on the Western Digital Support (support.wdc.com) site. Such formatting doesnt take long. Otherwise the backup will fail with an Error 0x8078002A code. After doing the reformat Windows Backup loves the thing. Western Digital has truly perfected the external USB drive with this model. I highly recommend it to anyone who cares even a little bit about losing their data. Take the time to do backups. Do it now.

I purchased this device after avoiding WD for years due to bad drives a long time ago, but after the recent rash of bad Toshiba hard drives, I decided to go back to WD and I purchased the drive, 4TB My Book for 99.99 as part of a Black Friday Flash Sale (literally was only like a hour and limit 1 per person) I decided to give them another shot, So I ordered it, got it very quickly with Amazon Prime and plugged it in, No extremley loud scratching, No clicking, Nothing out of the ordinary, but I wanted to verify the drive was good because 2 of the 3 last drives I have purchased have been bad with SMART data or just horrible grinding and clicking on day one, Needless to say they was returned ASAP. Anyways, I ran a full Extended check on the drive with WD LifeGuard Diagnostics and after 10 hours and 900 million sectores later, the drive is good, so extremely happy with my purchase for now, I cant say what will happen months down the road but after reviewing and seeing WD has really fixed there program, I dont belive I will have much issue, especially since I leave the drive unplugged from the PC I use daily to increase the life of the drive I love the WD internal drives, its all I ever purchase aside from Samsung Pro SSDs so expecting the same performance out of the externals

Ive had two external HD from Western Digital before. My first 2TB hard drives master boot record became corrupted. Through some tinkering some family and I were able to connect it to another computer to copy the data to another HD. Unfortunately, I only had another small (160G) HD in which to transfer data to my new laptop and another smaller HD. Dilema. So, I found this, which was exactly what I needed. When it arrived I connected it to the laptop with the fault, yet somewhat frazzled 2TB HD, and began to copy segmented amounts of data. Once all was done, I was able to format the older 2TB drive which is now in a new enclosure. So far this WD HD has performed perfectly. Ive split the data into different HDs to decrease the chance if this happens again. Ive never had any problems with any Western Digital product. When plugged in, if not in use, it will go into Idle mode. If you click on it to use it again, it may be slow to respond or may say Not responding briefly. This is normal because even though it is ON, it has gone to SLEEP. Saves power and wear.

What more could you expect from Western Digital? I purchased this item to put with my xbox one, I of coarse had to format it first as exFAT to be seen by the xbox one, but I knew that when I purchased it. I placed all my movies, music and pictures on this drive and it worked like a charm. Note for xbox one users, (just an FYI) when I first placed this into the side usb port of my xbox one, I got a message to format/prepare it, I chose cancel, Id already done this on my PC. Then powered off the xbox one and when I cut it back on I could then browse to and see this 6TB drive and all the files Id already put on it after formatting it to exFAT on my windows PC. Ive purchased a second drive just like this one to keep as a backup of this 6TB drive. The quality of this drive has lived up to my expectations, based on previous purchases of WD. When watching the movies, listening to the music, or showing the pictures Ive placed on this drive I have no issues of stuttering, blinking, nor any other type of delay nor interference.

Having some issues with the drive disconnecting and reconnecting, and it does not like to work with Windows Backup. I guess theres a fix to reformatting it in such a way that Windows backup will be able to work properly with it. Ive actually reformatted it twice, and I still cant get a restore image to save successfully, although it does create the image, and other backups through Windows backup seem intact, but I dont like to see errors. Ive got several backup drives, so I use my 2TB Seagate Free Agent, and that one doesnt have any issues. I think its the 3TB thing. I do a lot of WinZip Pro backups, instead. Otherwise, its ok. Speed is more limited by drive speed than USB 3.0. Where the USB 3.0 helps the most I think is when deciding which files need to be updated. The first full backups took quite a while, but I have A LOT of stuff to backup. BTW - a little tip to everyone - put your backup drives on notebook coolers! I used to burn one up every year or two. Since I started doing this, I havent lost a drive!

The last Western Digital Mybook I had was a 1TB that my father handed down to me. He bought it in 2007 and it lasted until 2011. That is pretty amazing. Though I might add it was used as a backup drive for his mac. Regardless, the drive was always plugged in and would do 1 hour backups 24/7. So while massive amounts of data were not being transferred 24/7, the discs would be spinning constantly. I used his MyBook for my own mac. For my uses, I transferred movies onto it and filled it to capacity. We had a scare when it stopped working in 2010, and I decided to try taking out the hard drive from the enclosure and putting it in one of my hot-swappable external hard drive bays. Turns out the connection ports on the MyBook fried or the soldering just cracked and lost connection. So I always check now when a drive dies before drilling 1/4 holes into it and tossing it in the trash, to always test it in an external drive bay to see if it was bad/aging soldering first. To get a better idea of what an external bay is, here is the one I bought

This product was a single design decision away from getting five stars. It is inexpensive and works well. The design decision that breaks it is what happens if it stops working well. The drive has an unreliable USB connection on the back. I think its a USB 3.0 micro type B jack, which is standard, but basically all mini and micro USB connectors are under-engineered and prone to failure. So if you dont treat it like a pint of nitroglycerine, your drive might just stop working. That seems to be a common problem. This, however, is not the fatal design flaw, because if that were the entire story, you could just take it apart, pull out the drive, use another adapter to plug it into your computer and be back in business. But you cant do that. It appears that WD drives that come with their Smartware are hardware encrypted whether you use a password or not. WD argues that this prevents a thief, even if you dont use a password, from removing the drive from the enclosure and reading your data. Thats true, but a thief wouldnt do that. He would just take the whole thing and plug it in, and it would work. What it does prevent is you from recovering your data if anything happens to that flimsy USB connector. Your data is locked. This is exactly what some early viruses did: they encrypted your hard drive so that you couldnt read it if you removed the virus. Oh, if you want to try soldering surface-mount semiconductors (anticipate failure) or paying one of the affiliates a months salary to decrypt it, you might get it back, but why should you have to do that? You might be able to find an empty enclosure with the exact same controller (emphasis on might). Hardware encryption in this case is pointless. If you want to encrypt your data, you can do it yourself instead of having it automatically encrypted with a key you dont know. I think they put it in so theyd have another bullet point in their sales flyer to impress people who dont understand computer storage. I loved this drive at first, until the USB connector got flaky (it still works if I treat it with kid gloves and promise it a cream cake later) and did some further research. That automatic hardware encryption is a deal-breaker. From now on, Ill just buy a SATA hard drive of my choice and put it in an enclosure with a standard USB/SATA interface, and if I want the data encrypted, Ill encrypt it. You can do that for about the same price. Amazon sells both.

The WD My Book 3 TB is a fast and capable storage solution for backups, archive files, and other data. I plan to use it to store my Adobe LightRoom archives and working copies. Western Digital is, by common agreement, the most reliable and powerful brand of hard drive on the market to day, and this device continues their tradition of delivering the best. Although Im giving a rating of five stars, Id like to point out a limitation of this drive thats due to operating systems rather than the drive itself. If you plan to use this drive only with Windows, then you can allocate all 3 TB as a single primary partition. If, however, you want to be able to use the drive with Windows and with OS X, then youll have to use 2 partitions. The reason is that the Windows NTFS file system supports 3 TB partitions, but the multi-platform exFAT file system that works with both Windows and OS X only supports 2 TB. If you use exFat to use the drive with both OSes, then youll have to split the drive into two partitions. You do have the choice of making the two partitions equal sizes.