WD 4TB Elements Portable External Hard Drive for Windows, USB 3.2 Gen 1/USB 3.0 for PC & Mac, Plug and Play Ready - ‎WDBU6Y0040BBK-WESN

I had a problem with another company so now I am all in with Western Digital. Haven't had any problems after a few years of use. I've bumped into it a few times and even dropped it from about a foot and a half and the little guy works great. Unfortunately 2TB isn't enough for information nowadays. I have had another company's external drive die on me after a few months, but WD has yet to let me down.

I just wanted to report my experience for a very specific use case: using this for Frigate NVR recordings.I have a Frigate NVR VM running in ProxMox (i3-14100). Plugged the drive in (went for a USB-C cable), and used USB pass-through. Formatted the main partition with ext4, and mounted at the storage/recordings directory. Moving the old recordings over (was on NVMe) at around 95MB/s. During normal operation, with 15 cameras recording, I see about 5MB/s being written to the USB drive.Overall, very happy with this setup. I didn't have any spare SATA ports, 4 used for a RAID-5 array (as my main NAS server) and I didn't want the recordings constantly spinning up that array - so I decided on a USB powered external drive just for recordings. I also have an NVMe drive for the VM storage, which was working fine, but I also had a slight concern regarding TBW (I have almost 20 cameras all recording). If there are issues with bandwidth, I'll post a follow-up.

I will give it only four stars at this time. The loss of a star is due to a missing 370 GB of space. It was purchased as a 4 TB drive, yet at startup only has 3.73 TB. That only looks good presented as a percentage; 92.5%. Yet, in actual data, it s 370 GB... quite a large sum.I just updated the stars. I Googled the problem and found this answer. The math comes out exact. I have found the missing bites."WD Elements external hard drives often appear smaller in capacity than advertised because manufacturers use different units of measurement for storage capacity. While the manufacturer might use a decimal system (1 GB = 1 billion bytes), operating systems like Windows and older Macs use a binary system (1 GB = 1.07 billion bytes). This difference in calculation leads to the discrepancy. "

This product performs and solves a problem that I had with my previous external drive. The previous drive would mount when plugged in, but when I ejected through the OS, it wouldn't eject properly and I would just pull out the drive and eventually, it corrupted and I lost all of the files. This drive doesn't have that issue and I'm very pleased by the mount and dismount.

Bought two.Very strong points: Both are going strong, making full and differential backups, for six years, on two computers.Since I've had mixed luck with automatic-backup software, I have to spend more time than I want keeping everything backed up, but these really great. These have been far more reliable than most external hard drives in the past.Minor Downside: Since they are high-speed spinning disks, handle them with great care when they are running or spinning down. To turn just the external hard drive off when not in use for a day or more: first you must software-eject the drive using Windows Explorer, then unplug the power plug because these don't have an on/off switch. Don't move it for about 5 minutes until it has stopped and is perfectly quiet and no vibration.

Very happy with my purchase, having a 1TB SSD main and this as my side piece external gives me all the space I need. Playing games on it the loading speeds are slightly slower on this HDD than the SSD but not by much. Other than that the gameplay performance is the same no matter which drive I'm using which are ultra settings everything in any game on my decent laptop (16GB DDR5 RAM, Nvidia Geforce 4060 graphics card). So any games that require a lot of loading and are newer I'll put on the SSD and everything else goes on this. Thank you, it is a great product.

I love this external hard drive! I have had one prior but ran out of room with my old one. I often store pictures and videos on this and hope it will be great for years to come as I continue to take photos of my son.

Good transfer speed, simple to use, and looks good on the desk next to the computer. Always a good practice to have your backup data in more than one place. With a couple of these, can copy more than one and then store one elsewhere.