WD 5 TB Elements Portable External Hard Drive – USB 3.0
WD 5 TB Elements Portable External Hard Drive – USB 3.0, Black
Big capacity in a small device
With up to 5TB in a lightweight design, you can take your photos, videos, music and other files wherever you go.
Improve PC performance
Free up space on your slow-moving PC by transferring files to your WD Elements drive, and get your PC moving again.
USB 3.0/2.0 compatible
With USB 3.0 connectivity, you get maximum performance when transferring your files to and from WD Elements portable drive.
 |  |  |  | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Capacity | Up to 5TB | Up to 5TB | Up to 5TB | Up to 2TB |
| Ideal for | Basic backup and storage | Premium portable storage with auto backup | Premium portable storage with auto backup in a design that brilliantly pairs metal and matte finishes to create a sophisticated style | Portable storage with blazingly-fast transfers |
| WD Backup Software | – | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Interfaces | USB 3.0 (USB 2.0 compatible) | USB 3.0/2.0 | USB-C ready with USB 3.1 adapter | USB Type-C and USB 3.1 Gen 2 ready (USB 3.0, USB 2.0 and USB-A compatible) |
| Weight: | 236 g |
| Dimensions: | 11.05 x 8.2 x 2.08 cm; 235.87 Grams |
| Brand: | Western Digital |
| Model: | WDBU6Y0050BBK-WESN |
| Colour: | Black |
| Batteries Included: | No |
| Manufacture: | Western Digital |
| Dimensions: | 11.05 x 8.2 x 2.08 cm; 235.87 Grams |
This product is great. It does what it says on the tin. I was confident in using it based on the description. I think there are some areas can be improved but it’s too early to tell yet. It’s well made, and will look forward to using in continously.
So far so good, works well and has a decent speed for what it is.
Its no SSD but its doing the job, will of course need to see how it does long term but so far no complaints.
This little HDD has plenty of storage and reads/writes at a decent speed. I have had no problems with it, so haven’t used tech support, and therefore can’t comment on that.
Capacity is excellent. It’s light and has a pretty fast access time too. It needs no external power supply to carry round with it which is a real bonus. A small piece of advice is to buy a spare lead for it, so you can leave the cable permanently hooked up to your Hi-Fi!
Been a good year or longer since I purchased and it’s still working.
My grandad uses this to store his photos on that he takes every day so it’s in constant use.
Sleek and light but feels robust.
Good product, no complaints
This is my 3rd purchase of this drive, to be a backup and main photo holder for my wife’s laptop. I have one on my PC and one on a piece of music making gear. They do the job with no fuss, and no need to go to the expense of SSD as they don’t go anywhere.
I have a lot of these and they never failed me once. If dependability and cost effectiveness are what you want. Go for this. If you need faster transfer rates go SSD.
Works well if you wanna store stuff or free up space on your PC, whatever files it may be.
Won’t work well as a door stop.
No clue as to why it asks about the rating for Tech Support.
May be cheap for the price, I wouldn’t store games on it though, or on any hard drive.
I love these external hard drives from Western Digital, they’re just great. I’m a photographer and have 5 now and all work perfectly.
Small enough to put in a coat pocket or bag without taking up too much room, so really easy to take on a location and they don’t take up too much room on your desk either.
All round great product, I wouldn’t use any other brand.
Does exactly what it is supposed to. Connect to PC and instantly start to store/transfer files. Light and easy to carry with a large capacity for the price. Recommended for anyone looking for a backup/storage drive.
Use it several times and it works well especially if you are travelling
This external hard disc is very easy to use especially using File Explorer. It has plenty of space for my needs.
This can be used for ANY backup or storage situation, all that’s required is that you format it accordingly.
It comes pre formatted as FAT32 which is compatible with most operating systems, however you can format it to whatever you choose.
No need for a separate power cable.
Excellent for offloading all of those photos from your phone just before a holiday.
This portable HDD performs as expected unlike two recent purchases from other manufacturers which were very slow despite descriptions of speed being indistinguishable.
My only doubt arises because a previous example of the same model failed after only a comparatively short life.
It is a hard drive, not solid state, so you shouldn’t chuck it around while it is in use, not that I would any way as I am using it with a desktop computer but if you were using it as an external drive for a mobile laptop it may be more of an issue.
It is very quiet but I can’t put my Lego millennium falcon on top of it as it does then produce a slight hum due to the moving discs inside. I have been using it for nearly a month now and filled it with less than 500Gb so quite a way to go.
A very nice, compact and unobtrusive unit.
Cheers,
Schnuz.
I used to think the “Ultra” drives were faster than the USB3 drives, but on my PC, there doesn’t seem to be much in it if anything, speed-wise. This 5TB drive is quiet, has a decent turn of speed, though not blisteringly fast, and I expect it to give many years of reliable service.
Supplied with a short USB A (3) USB B (3) lead, it’s simply plug and play and Windows recognises it and allows you to use it. It comes supplied with some WD software, but I just popped that in a folder unused, as the WD Passport drives always work fine out of the box. My drive was made in Thailand, and looking at a few of them, most of my WD Passport drives were made in Thailand (even the really old 250GB ones), though I have one which was made in Malaysia. Oddly enough, the Malaysian drive is my only WD Passport I’ve got that’s a little bit noisy as it vibrates slightly in use. It works fine, but I’m guessing if I do ever get an external 2.5″ drive fail on me, it’ll be that one. All the others I have are quiet.
Whatever you need external storage for, the WD Passport drives are excellent, and when you upgrade your PC, you don’t need to faff about transferring all your data over if you use these drives. Highly recommended!
Perhaps I am just lucky? or other failure have been caused by ‘Transport issues’ in the first instance.
No drive likes being bounced around or dropped, altough mine have always survived unlike Toshiba/Seagate drives!
The 5400 RPM is excellent for Video as too much error correction is NOT what you really want since it slows things down when connected to items like a smart TV. No problems with Data either.
Little gem’s!
When asked, Sony wouldn’t recommend any named product, just a spec. As I have found out, this is not easy, especially as I have followed both the spec guide and usb HDD maker’s instructions for them (2 failures) not to work. The WD Elements is great, works well and is cost effective compared to the previous 2 usb HDD’s. I’ve given the review result as 4 stars only because I’ve just purchased it and longevity is not yet proved, otherwise it would be 5 star.
Once registered to the TV as with any disk of this type, portability is confined to use with the TV.
Finally, I’d like to praise the service I received from Amazon as I purchased 2 previous usb hdd’s that were supposed to be compatible with my TV but we’re not; these usb HDD’s were 40% more expensive than the WD Elements usb HDD and the Amazon return, refund and replacement worked really well and gives confidence for the future.
The generic saved settings would save about 2-3 days of settings and runs to get them sounding the way you wanted Vital when you’re talking about $10’s of thousands a day for the studio let alone the cost of staff etc. They replaced ALL of the contents which would have been about 53,000 not to mention the time allocating the custom settings and the correct folders , then authorising them too. There would have been over 3,400 at least (this is going by my back up book I have with the basics on a shorthand version. Would have taken months to get them so E manually, loading each individual compressor for example and typing the setting then saving, unloading it then over and over
I’m no longer a WD fan and it’s a shame after over 25 years of using them.
I bought this specifically to take my PS4 games off the internal PS5 SSD but I didn’t want to get a ‘game drive’ specific one as I would have more freedom if I wanted to partition it and backup some PC files as well.
The setup couldn’t have been easier, I took it out of the box, plugged it in and the PS5 recognised it instantly. I had to format the drive before I could use it which I thought might take a few minutes at most but only took 5 seconds, then I selected around 360GB of PS4 games/apps and started the transfer.
After the format I had 1.8TB free which is more than enough and with all drives they need space for their base operating software which is usually a small fraction off the stated capacity, a lot of people clearly don’t understand this from some of the reviews complaining they got less capacity than they purchased -_-
The transfer was speed really good for a physical drive, better than I was expecting, it took just over an hour for it to finish moving the whole 350+GB to the external drive.
My PS5 told me once that the drive wasn’t removed properly after powering on after being in rest mode, I didn’t remove the drive at all so I’m not sure why it said that. This error message has only come up once and happened the first time the console had been in rest mode with the new drive connected. The console has been in rest mode and turned off multiple times after this message and hasn’t given me the error since so it may just be a one time thing.
I’ll update this review if I come across any issues.
Loading PS4 games from the External as opposed to launching them from the internal SSD was a little bit slower. All times below were timed from the point of clicking resume on my game file to actually getting into the game.
– Resident Evil 7 took 77sec to load which I’d played the day before on the PS5 SSD which probably took under 30 seconds. In-game the performance was perfect, no frame drop, no noticeable delay on textures rendering in.
– Horizon Zero Dawn took 30-40sec which was actually quicker than RE7 despite being a huge open world game, the in-game performance was perfect too even with the 60FPS patch.
– God of War took 29 seconds to load into the game.
– Batman Arkham Knight took just 32 seconds to load my save and get into the game.
– Mortal Shell took just 20 seconds to load into the game.
– Call of Duty Modern Warfare took 56 seconds to load into the game from chapter selection.
I have chosen this HDD because I have already other WD device and I found them very reliable and since during the Black Friday it was on offer I decided to that advantage of it.
In the box I found the HDD itself a leaflet with the info and a USB 3 cable to be used to connect the HDD to the computer
I didn’t test it with specific SW but I ‘m satisfied by reading writing speed of the HDD (as the main purpose is back my data)
Worth noting that the real HDD size is 4.5 TB and not 5 as advertised
One useful piece of information tech support did supply was that the device should be plugged into the USB ports on the rear of any desktop PC, as the front ports tend to have slightly different voltages which can cause some problems.
Device is now working effectively and has attained copy speeds of up to 120Mb/s on many of my larger files. Same sized files copied to a flash drive take a bit longer (My test was a 1.8 Gb to the HDD = 16 sec and to a 128 Gb flash drive – over six minutes.
I would advise anyone thinking of purchasig this item to have a close look at the description supplied. Apparently there is a new model available, which could fix future problems for buyers. AND I did notice despite complaints by some MAC users it does state you have to reformat the drive for MAC’s.
I have several external hard drives like this which I use as incremental back-ups. Due to the low failure rate, at the moment I tend to buy the WD make. I or someone have accidentally dropped it or knocked it on the floor several times and it seems to be fine.
In case you’re after compact storage where it’s easy to see which drive you want, maybe consider storage items that don’t have the mark-up of dedicated “computery” storage? I keep mine in ASIN B076KJDN3F, a 9-slot make-up palette holder (clear acrylic).
P.S. added 26.5.21: Just bought this for the fourth time and this time it came without a cable. It effectively means a small price rise, but mainly it’s inconvenient. If you’re buying this for the first time and don’t already have a suitable cable, please be warned that you’ll need to buy one.
P.P.S. added 4.11.22: Bought two more, both came with cables. I’m using one – all good like before – plug and play. Haven’t used the other yet. Sad to see the price has soared.
P.P.S. added 16.1.24: Just bought my 14th. Found it won’t activate (but tries – constantly clicks) if plugged into the hub that’s connected to my laptop, but it works fine (as per the previous 13) if plugged directly into my laptop – this was despite my computer guru friends saying it should work if plugged into the hub.