WD 2TB My Book Desktop External Hard Drive - USB 3.0 - WDBFJK0020HBK-EESN

I'm sure that this very large capacity external hard drive will prove to be superb and reliable at holding many thousands of my RAW photos taken on my 24mb DSLR - but setting up it up proved to be a real problem.This, I'm sure, was down to my own PC set up and won't apply to most, especially if it's your first external hard drive.Having several other external drives, of lesser capacity, already running, my PC wouldn't set up, or show that even the WD was connected. No light on, no sound, no faint vibration that the unit was operating. Usually, such are 'Plug in and Play', as have been my couple of large Seagates and are a doddle to set up and start using immediately. In the end, I contacted Amazon to say that I was returning it as a dud.In a final desperate attempt, I unplugged all my other USB devices - and then, reconnecting the WD on its own and lo and behold, it opened up and worked perfectly - and has now done so silently and faultlessly for the month since. It seems to like to think that it is the only and default hard drive and like a cuckoo likes to muscle other, smaller ones out! Or so, it seemed to me. I had to add the other drives later.Six TB is a really big space to fill, of course and the extra 1TB costs quite a lot more proportionally than the 5TB Seagate I also had running. They've been fine too and I can recommend them. The unit looks good too.My 4 stars is because I did experience worrying set up problems, which as I say, probably won't apply to most. And it is quite expensive, capacity wise, over the now-standard 4 or 5TB units. But WD do have a good reputation and the huge capacity makes it a long term investment, but as always, I do have the data on it backed up also on the smaller drives. There is no such thing as a failure proof drive and it's always wise to back up elsewhere but thankfully it seems that the vast majority of them are now very reliable - just never move them when they are running!

Used a lot of WD Elements drives that I've never had a problem with but bought this 3TB MyBook as needed it quickly and 3TB Elements were out of stock.Had trouble with this as soon as I connected it to my Windows 7 PC as it promptly connected then disconnected itself automatically. Contacted WD and ran the diagnostics program they asked me to, sent them the results and they decided it was faulty out of the box as test results showed it had multiple "bad sectors". Their warranty conditions [read the small print] mean that if I was to return the drive to them, despite it being faulty out of the box would mean using a specialist trackable courier [at my cost] at a cost of around £15 to send it to Swindon and getting a "reconditioned" replacement from Poland......... That basically means I'd be paying £15 more for what is actually a second hand drive over a new one. Um.......No thanks!Actually WD got it wrong anyway. I discovered that the MyBook range [which includes backup software and encryption] requires a special driver to operate and the SES Driver [as it is called] provided on WD's support site is over 4 years old and obviously doesn't work correctly with newer MyBooks. They make the new hardware but don't provide the up to date driver that it requires to work! It was failing the tests, not because of bad sectors but because the special driver wouldn't function and the drive kept disconnecting. After a little Google I found a 2015 SES driver on Microsofts site and that works fine and no problems since.My recommendation is that if you don't need the rather feature limited auto backup [there are better fully featured freeware alternatives online] or the hardware AES encryption and just want reliable external storage then buy from the "Elements" range, which I think is still a better proposition than buying an external Seagate drive.If you do have immediate problems then contact Amazon and report it as faulty as they will cover the return costs and give you a full refund, rather than sending you a "reconditioned" [meaning second hand] piece of rubbish from Poland

I got this HDD as a replacement for my 1TB MyBook that I got in 2009 (still working). The upgrade for me is not just the capacity but the fact that it is controlled by my telly. When the telly is off so is the drive, likewise when the telly is on the drive is on. Another thing I like about this HDD is the light, it is smaller, white (instead of blue), and in general more discrete which makes it blend in more with the sky box, ps4, and the stand itself.The only thing I have noticed that is a rather negative is the speed. Copied few large files on the drive but the speed would not go over 21MB, quite disappointing to be honest, and yes I was connecting to USB 3.0 port.Overall I'm happy with the purchase and I'm sure this drive will save me a few euros on electricity over the years.

The drive is performing well and I bought it to allow me to change my laptop backups to USB3 directly connected from over the network to a NAS drive. The older backups were taking up to 10 hours to compete (215GB image) with this new drive attached to a USB3.0 Express card in my laptop the same backups are now taking in total about 1 hour..I will say that don't bother with all the WD software that comes with the drive, its all 'rubbish'. It doesn't perform well, doesn't actually work the way its supposed to and when you raise any questions to Western Digital they can't be bothered, their forums are littered with complaints..The drive is great the software is 'pants' so ditch it and used the extra space for movies, pictures and music. There are plenty of freeware or other vendors backup and recovery software out on the internet that perform well and actually work!! :-)