原文： **FOR MAC USERS!! After 2 "failed" drives were sent back, I called customer support to find out why I wasn't able to troubleshoot via any online methods, and get this to work for my mac! Apparently the solution was insanely easy, but I never saw this eeeasy solution online in any of the foru
ms I found. The issue with erasing/formatting for a mac just has to do with the view you have open in Disk Utility. Make sure you go to View > Show All Devices, and then "erase" the top tier drive. Problem solved.
原文： When it comes to Western Digital, they make excellent external storage solutions. I first bought an Elements drive back in 2010 (640GB), then another one in 2013 (2TB), and now once again at the end of 2017. None failed on me yet. I've used this drive for a couple weeks now and copied about 1TB of f
iles via USB3. I use a Windows 10 Home machine and transfer speeds range from 40-170MB/s depending on the files. My last two Elements drive were USB2 and they max out around 35MB/s, so this is a welcome improvement.
If you are suffering from low transfer rates, here's some advice: Try to defrag your source disk (or trim it if it's an SSD). I tried this method and having each file in one piece of the disk can help access times to be much quicker.
For those who want to know which HDD is inside my Elements, it's a WD Blue 4TB drive (I checked the model number as WD40EZRZ). So if anything happens, it could be just the SATA-USB bridge connector and not the drive itself.
原文： Bought for my boyfriend. The 4TB external worked great for his PS4. He said some of the memory was used for converting but he has 7x the amount of space he started with. He is very happy with this item and I will update my review if he comes across any problems.
原文： This drive is fine for storing your files, but it has a big flaw that almost made me return the 2 that I had purchased, and that is the USB cables they come with.
While backing up and transferring files, without being moved, both drives would become unresponsive and lose connection. I tho
ught it was both drives that were defective and almost declared them garbage. But I decided to try new cables before returning, and I'm glad I did. Both drives now work flawlessly.
So if you decide to buy this drive, you must not rely on the cable it comes with. I advise you to buy a good cable to go with it. For this, I decided to take 2 stars off.
原文： Needed another back up for my husbands new computer and I've had one for myself for about 5 years. Works great, but if you have Macs like us, you need to format it and that's easy to do. There is an online page that walks you through it. So, it's not plug and play for Mac users.
原文： First drive was dead on arrival with the click of death. I figured I'd give them another shot, since failures happen. Sent it back to Amazon, got a replacement. Second drive lasted less than a week before *click* *click* *click*, it too was dead. Sent it back for a refund.
Two failure
s out of two drives is too high for a third chance.
原文： I got this to replace a different Western Digital external HDD model . The old one was a hermetically sealed plastic brick. Plastic doesn't conduct heat very well, so I guess the previous drive died from excessive heat. Its twin is still going strong. Its pretty bad when your backup dies, so you nee
d to have a couple of backups, just in case.
This drive holds the platters vertically, which I would think is better than horizontally like the previous drive. It also has vents, to let the hot air escape out the top, and cooling air enter at the bottom.
Set up was a snap. It was plug and play with Windows 7. I deleted the software that came on the drive. I use SyncToy (from Micro$oft) to backup my data.
I don't do a lot of accessing of this drive, so data transfer rate isn't a big deal. I seem to see about 18 MBytes/Sec using USB 2.0 My laptop doesn't do USB 3.0)
It spins down after some length of idle time, but wakes up pretty quickly. The computer sleeps every night, but I don't have to do anything special to wake it up.
