WD 14 TB Elements Desktop External Hard Drive - USB 3.0, Black

I bought 2x 14TB HDD for £190 on Amazon Prime Day sale as a upgrade to my home server (and backup server) storage. Each machine was running a 8TB Toshiba, 4TB WD and 4TB Seagate. Intention is to eventually replace one of the 4TBs from each machine. But for now, they are running plugged into the USB ports. The drives arrived safely boxed and plugging in and switching on was very easy, with no drivers required. I reformatted them and copied the data from one the 4TB drives over. This was particularly painful and took about 2 days over the USB interface, achieving around 36MByte/s when I was checking which wasn't really USB 3.0 speed but more USB 2 speed. Though this could be down to my ageing servers rather than the drives. The drives themselves ran with relatively little noise, I'd say there were quieter in the enclosure than my Toshiba 8TB drives were inside my PC cases! The drives themselves did get quite warm, but not hot, certainly less warm than the Toshibas (though those did run hot) Once these bed in for a few more days and I've copied my data across, I will test my next plan and update the review accordingly... Update 20 Oct 2020: Having opened up the case, the drives are 14TB WD140EMFZ drives. I've "shucked" the drives out and attached them directly to the SATA connectors on my PCs. This has then yielded the full potential of the performance of these drives. I've sequential read of around 190MByte/s transfer speeds now which is pretty damn good considering it's in a 5 year old PC. Perfectly adequate for a PC storage drive or NAS drive. Random Read/Write is pretty bad, but in this age, spinning disks really are not the solution for such operations and I suggest you get yourself a cheap SSD for that sort of usage. Update 17 Nov 2020: These drives have been running flawlessly for a month now. My backup server had a PSU failure and upon replacing PSU, the drive (and others) carried on working falwlessly. To answer a comment. These drives when shucked out are exactly the same as form factor and data and power connectivity as any standard SATA internal 3.5" drive. screw holes etc are all in standard places. Update 23 Apr 2021: These drives have now been running for 6 months. I've upgrade my backup server and now both machines are running 24/7. Both 14TB drives still seem fine with currently no indications of any issues. Hopefully, touch wood this will keep going this way for a long time...

For the size the price is excellent. I copied 16TB across from 2 Macs in 1 day. So speed and data reliability is excellent. Comes with Acronis which was a pleasant surprise. You do need the WD drive connected to use/configure Acronis. Overall superb drive for all my backup data.

Nice big drives and totally worth it if you can get them on sale. They do make a noise every 4.8 seconds when they are connected and idle. It's a feature called PWL (Preventive Wear Leveling) that stops the reading needle from sticking and apparently prolongs the drive's life. On the 10tb or lower drives you might not notice it unless you are actually holding the drive. Larger drives (16GB+) have a much stronger vibration and it is quite audible if the drive is placed on a hard surface, like your desk, due to resonance. It can actually be quite annoying and they really haven't done anything to try dampen it's effect on these larger drives with better casing, insulation or anything. So, if you are getting the larger versions and plan to have it connected all the time next to you I highly recommend you put something soft under it, like an insulation pad or even just a folded cloth. That will reduce the effect of the PWL ticks quite a lot. You can allow windows to turn off the drive when it's not in use too if you find the right USB Mass Storage Device in Device Manager. That will stop the noise when it's not in use but obviously it needs to spin up again when you want to use it. The noise the large drives make when spinning up is also quite loud and grindy. Excluding the drive from Windows Defender checks, if you use it, will also reduce how often the drive spins up randomly from time to time. You just choose exclude folder, select This PC and then select and exclude the entire drive. Only do that if you are happy with it being excluded from all virus checks though.

Great capacity and price, fast speed. As described

Western Digital make great quality external hard drives and I have never had any issues with any of them...so far! touch wood I would always recommend getting a smaller size hard drive (4tb max size) if possible as they can fail and losing so much data (6tb+) can be difficult to take. I've also read that larger size hard drives are more likely to fail but cannot confirm this. These devices are incredibly easy to setup and use. Just plug in the USB cable and you're away. Note: I would highly recommend using a 3.0 usb slot when transferring large files. USB 3.0 does downgrade to USB 2.0 slots but the speeds are so much slower. If you dont have a usb 3.0 lot then use the 2.0 slot but if your desktop pc has multiple drives then make sure you use the faster 3.0 slot. As mentioned before, I can't fault these drives so far. My only concern is the varying write speeds. A few of the hard drives I have purchased seem to have much faster write speeds than others despite being the same model. I do not know why this is but others have mentioned possible cost cutting and use of slower drives/materials. It can be frustrating but isn't too bad on the whole, it just means waiting a few minutes more. Lastly, PLEASE DO NOT leave your hard drive on all the time! The heat generated will impact the drive and can lead to problems. These drives shouldn't be left unused for a long time but should NOT be used constantly as a seperate drive. They are for storage/backup of larger files to decrease file space on your pc/laptop. If you feel like the hard drive is getting hot or been on for a long time, then please safely eject the device and allow it to cool down. Overall I'm very happy with my purchase. Delivery was very fast and Amazon were much cheaper than any where else. I will definitely be buying another one in the future and hope Western Digital continue making high quality but affordable products like this.

I have a particular ned for this external drive, it connects nicely to my Small NUC computer in the left. Attached to that is also a DAS. I ordered the 18TB version of the drive, seems decent value for that amount of storage. As this one is not being shucked it will enjoy the two years warranty, that has always been a pleasure to deal with Western Digital. As part of the Preventative Wear Levelling feature this drive makes noises when idle. When I was testing it, sat on my desk, the noise increased due to it being on the wooden desk. Placing a foam mat underneath the drive actually helped, a lot. The clicking and whirring is either annoying or, as I now have it in the loft, a non-issue. It is not overly loud, when cushioned, but it is there. Windows 11 saw the drive right away, I formatted it to NTFS and had just over 16TB free to use. The drive case is well made and connects by USB A type port at ver 3.0 std. I would consider it portable, albeit it needs an external PSU. I typically get speeds of around 180MB/s when pushed over my 2.5GB LAN, that nis for a large file. As the drive is holding media the files sizes are typically large. The NUC N100 acts as a media sharing PC for TV's and others to access around the house. Overall, I am impressed with the drives speed, streaming media from it is not an issue. I accept that these drives are always going to be sold on their raw unformatted capacity, meaning I will never get to use the 18TB noted at sale. Hence having just over 16TB when formatted with NTFS and that has always seemed to apply, no matter how much it annoys me. A good brand and well made. If it is next to you, just consider that it will make some noise every five seconds or so, small, but noticeable. That is normal. As mentioned, I have not shucked this one, happy enough to leave it as it is and enjoy the warranty. Recommended.

Had it for 2 months now and is 2/3 full with backup of videos, movies and photos. I don't find it noisy. Speed is ok for me. What i do like is that if you are watching a movie you can pause for ages and it will contine the film without hesitation. If i do that on my toshiba ext HD it 'glitches' the image on the screen for a few seconds while it sorts itself out. The only negative is if connected but not in use it takes seconds to spin up from idle when sent a command. Would recommend.

WD 8TB Elements Desktop External Hard Drive - USB 3.0 Excellently priced for 8TB of storage. Curry’s had it at £10 more and wanted to charge delivery. Delivered next day free of charge from Amazon which was good. As this is a Western Digital drive the manufacturer has a 3-year warranty. I own lots of WD drives (I even have a 2TB home cloud for years now) and I have NEVER had a single failure. I am using the drive as external storage and I am already up to over 7TB. As it’s USB 3.0, it is very fast at both read and write. The supplied USB 3.0 cable is about 1m which is quite good. Allows me to sit the drive on my desk with the computer under the desk. A few negatives but only tiny things: It stands upright and doesn’t take much to tip it over, twice I have knocked my knee on the desk and the drive has fallen over whilst it was in use. It could do with some sort of stand for the base to prevent this. I would not call it a portable drive, it requires a power adapter (supplied with it), and its not one of those 2.5inch drives, it is quite chunky. Regarding the button on the rear, its not clear what it is ‘supposed’ to do. While the drive is running, holding the button for 5 seconds will shut the drive down. If the drive is in standby (not shut down) it will wake it up. If a short press when it is running, it will go to standby and then sometimes immediately wake again! When in standby, it can take a while to run up to speed, specially annoying when booting my computer in the morning as the computers BIOS detects the drive but then has to wait for it to spin up and ‘come online’ before my computer continues to boot. Although this may only be a matter of 10 or 15 seconds, it doubles my computer boot time which is normally only 10 seconds! If I remember to shut the drive down at night, then this is not a problem, but who does that! It churns away on its own, it has a constant ‘duh-du’ sound about every 5 seconds with the odd ‘duh-du-du’. As it’s sat on my desk it just sounds like someone drumming their fingers on the desk. It’s very quiet but noticeable, I’m constantly wondering what it’s doing! Overall, excellent value for money, well respected manufacturer, excellent speed and capacity.