Being used as a backup drive for desktop Windows PC. When bought was just less than 19/TB which seems quite cost effective. Provided with USB cable and an assemble-yourself plug which included UK option.

White LED on front indicates power – flashes when drive is accessed. Haven’t checked speed because I use it for occasional bulk backups which take hours whatever drive I use. Case is very dark grey rather than black.

 

Fast, quiet, large capacity… everything I need in an external drive for my backups.

 

very pleased with this, while not the cheapest, I`ve had this a while now with no problems. a good reliable product.

 

Has been working reliably for 3 years now being used daily. All other external drives have failed after a very short time, so I highly recommend this product.

 

Like other reviewers, I too have the irritating heartbeat access every few seconds. It is apparently “Preemptive wear leveling” (PWL) and perfectly normal. And perfectly irritating!

The only solution is to dismount the drive when you are not using it. Which is fine for someone like me who uses the drive for Near Line Storage (ie. backups) but obviously no good for someone who needs to keep it connected all the time.

Other than that the drive has been utterly reliable and good value for money.

 

WD drives have been monotonously reliable for me over the years. bought this t take a full back of a 16TB NAS before wiping and reinstalling. it just plugs in, works and we transferred all the data there and back. took a while, but it is a lot of data.
the drive does not move from the desk, so portability is not an issue, and having never had to contact their tech support (stuff just works!) I cant rate that either!

 

Had it 3 months and no problems. I got loads of photos/videos from my phone to laptop. I then dragged onto this external hard drive. It’s not the quickest coming on when plugged in but find it reliable due to having to return a different manufacturer. So far good.

 

I like Western Digital products they have never let me dow

 

The drive is almost silent when it is switched on. PC startup takes longer because the hdd self-test is also long. (5-10s more than usualy) It is especially noisy when booting, but the device is designed for 24/7 use, which is normal (it is not designed for constant booting). It is indeed louder than usual when reading or writing, but based on my personal experience, the speed goes hand in hand with an increase in noise. I was worried based on what was written before me, but I recommend the hdd to everyone as a second drive for data storage in a desktop PC. The constant 5 second click is not disturbing (usual) and after 20 minutes the hdd stops. I have attached some speed tests. Highly recommended for purchase. Desktop PC can only be used with a sata-molex connector.

 

The Amazon web page says it’s suitable for Windows 10+ computers. The leaflet with the disk says MacOS only.

In fact the whole drive is formatted as NTFS, which both Windows and Mac can work with. I don’t run either of those OSes; I formatted the drive with the Linux ext4 file system and it seems fine with that.

I tried the Report-wrong-information link on the Amazon site, but nothing happened, even after I’d disabled Ublock Origin temporarily.

 

I have 8 of these in various capacities from 10TB to 16TB. I use the drives mainly to back up FCPX Event archives and related video production content.

I format to a Mac format, plug in and go. The drives are fast enough to do simple FCPX edits on as occasionally I have to go back to and old FCPX event and amend and re-output a project without having to copy back over to my fast edit drive. Wouldn’t do a heavy 4K project on the drive though.

I have had issues with the build quality of other major brands but now pretty much in the Western Digital camp for archive. Also use WD potable drives on a daily basis too.

 

So i have bought the 10TB model 9.3TB ish is what you actually get as windows calculates this differently than you would expect..

I bought this unit to on and connected on 24/7 so i have also purchased the 3 years insurance which was about 7 extra Worth it in my opinion.

So this item is being used as storage for my Plex media Centre..

The item seems to be really good for my needs plenty of space and doesn’t seem to heat up too much atall.
Currently the unit has been running for the last week continuously.

The unit its self is warm To touch as you expect but nothing that seems Too hot or that there is any problem.
Its a low heat that is to be expected.
The transformer (Power adaptor) is also warm to the touch but only slightly and again not hot and nothing out of the ordinary for an item that has been on 24/7 for the last week (at the time of this review)

I managed to get a transfer rate of around 75mb transfer rate over usb 3.0 with this item

Overall I’m happy and i will update this in time with reliability of the item

++UPDATE (24th jan) this hdd has now been running 24/7 since day of purchase and as of this update that is just over 3 months solid this unit has been powered on and in use with no problems++

Further update it is now 13/04/23 at the point of this update and this hdd has been powered on 24/7 since the day i bought the unit which was oct 2020 so almost 2.5 years with absolutely no problems atall and not being switched off..
Still stable still working as intended and i.ln daily use..

I will add more updates as time goes by

 

The WD 10TB Elements are nearly half the price of a WD Red 10TB (which I use a lot) so I decided to buy one. To be honest I was pretty disappointed with the enclosure the drive comes in as it’s made entirely of plastic and resonates the drive noise and vibrations. It doesn’t look like it would offer any protection if you drop the drive either.

After fully testing the drive for any errors (approximately 72 hours!), as an ‘experiment’, I decided to ‘shuck’ it which is essentially removing the drive from it’s plastic USB enclosure. Plenty of videos online on how to do this but essentially:

– Use 4 plastic/credit cards and slide one into each corner of the rear plate, in between the rear plate and sides (this dislodges the hidden internal plastic clips).
– Slide the inner part of the enclosure out from the front part of the casing
– Unscrew the USB controller from the bottom of the drive
– Gently push from the bottom of the drive and slide it out from the enclosure
– Remove the 4 rubber corners from the drive
– Remove the USB controller from the drive by sliding it off the drive
– Remove the USB controller mount from the drive by removing the screw
– Jobs a goodun!

Disclaimer: Shucking the drive will most likely void your warranty so just be aware of that if you are considering doing it!

To my (pleasant) surprise I discover what appears to be a white label WD Red 10TB drive inside. The hard drive chassis is identical to the WD Reds I currently own and has model number WD100EMAZ. The drive has firmware 83.H0A83 which is the same as my other WD Reds and on checking the S.M.A.R.T. values for the drive it also includes a Helium level counter, so, this is very likely to be the same drive as used for the WD100EFAX WD Red 10TB. I now have the drive running in a Synology as part of an array so if it dies it’s not the end of the world.

I think it’s a bit of a lottery what you might get from shucking drive enclosures but sizes 10TB and upwards are likely to be the newer, Helium filled drives and are potentially rebadged WD Red drives.

I have bought several WD Red 10TB drives for use in my NAS’s which tend to be quite expensive and hover anywhere from 280 to 350 a pop. The WD Red I use is the WD100EFAX model which are 10TB, helium filled, 5400 rpm drives and come with a 3 year warranty. WD Red drives are tested and rated for use in NAS enclosures but Backblaze use also 1000’s of desktop drives in their datacentre with great success.

 

It was less than 2 years ago that I purchased an 8Tb Seagate Backup hub Plus external drive – what I thought then was a “big” drive, but found I had filled that up all too soon. I use this drive to backup my NAS, which stores all my media, so as this slowly grew in size, I needed to get myself a higher capacity drive.

Enter the Western Digital 14Tb Elements drive, which at 249 at the time of writing, represents pretty decent value considering I paid 179 for the aforementioned 8Tb Seagate model a couple of years back. Strangely, if I want to buy the equivalent drive as a bare unit i.e not housed in an external enclosure with all the additional electronics that entails, it would actually cost me over 300! Why a less expensive to produce version should cost more than one in an enclosure is beyond me.

The WD unit is rather like a heavy book, in that one edge is curved, rather reminding me of the spine of a hard back. On this surface you will find the single power/activity LED, which is quite small. The drive has small rubber feet such that it stands in a vertical orientation – like a book in a book case. This is perhaps the best orientation for air flow given the vented top and rear edges. I personally don’t really like drives standing up like this, it’s too vulnerable to being knocked if its stood on a busy desk. Lying flat is OK, but I think my unit ran a little hotter like that. I don’t know why WD do not provide an optional to fit stand with wider feet to provide better stability. Such a simple plastic stand would cost next to nothing to produce and would give customers the option to have a more secure base.

That minor gripe aside, the drive itself is impressive in its performance. Unlike the Seagate which was an SMR type drive and thus termed an “archive” drive that suffered from slow write performance at just 38.7 Mb/sec sequential writes according to my Crystal Disk Mark test, the WD Elements 14Tb drive tested at an impressive 214Mb/sec read and write sequential transfer rate. For reference, the Seagate tested at around 118Mb/sec sequential read as I recall.

As with these large capacity drives, the head seek action is quite heavy, far heavier than my internal 2Tb drives and will feel like the drive is suffering from a fit of the shakes when initializing after a power on. Not an issue, but worthy of note to those who may think they have received a faulty unit. The previously mentioned 8Tb Seagate had a heavy seek action too, but not as heavy as this monster from WD, I can only imagine it may have to do with the high platter count such high capacity hard drives have.

These external drives actually appear to run warmer than internal drives, so it’s advisable to situate the drive somewhere where it is not penned in by other items. The drive performed flawlessly when I backed up my entire NAS to it over my horribly slow USB 2 connection on the NAS (only one I have) and took some 81.5 hours to complete the transfer of some 7.3Tb of data. So, it is certainly able to operate continuously for that length of time without issue. Of course, had I backed up via a USB 3 connection, then the transfer would’ve been far faster.

I suggest that purchasers of this drive, as with all Western Digital drives, register them on the WD website in order to ensure the full warranty cover.

The drive comes complete with the required power and USB cables of generous lengths. The drive has no power switch as such, so once connected to power and an active USB port, will power up. This drive seems to be smart enough to power down/enter standby if the connected computer is shut down or goes to sleep.

Connected to a Windows 10 PC, the drive reports 12.7Tb available. Of course, 12.7Tb is what I call “proper” Terra bytes despite hard drive manufacturers deeming a Tb to be an even 1,000Gb where as I, being old school, see a Tb as 1,024Gb hence the 12.7Tb shown in Windows. That’s fine, not a WD thing as all manufacturers go with this system of measurement. The drive’s default volume label is “Elements”, but of course you can change this if you so wish. Nothing required to do if using with a Windows based computer, so you can immediately start copying files to it once connected as the drive is pre formatted using NTFS. Mac users will either need to reformat or use a utility to permit use of NTFS file systems. No backup software is supplied with this drive, unlike the My Book series from WD. however, this is a bonus as I generally prefer not to use the software provided by the manufacturer for this purpose anyway. A quick note to those less computer savvy; There are numerous free backup programs for Windows you can use if you need backup software.

This Western Digital 14Tb Elements is an impressive drive at an impressive price.

 

At present my files are being stored on two Toshiba eStore Canvio 3TB external drives, but in practise only my images and music files are strictly being backed up to one of these drives from my laptop. The remaining movie files of my DVD and VHS collection have been uploaded for easy and quick access for streaming to my TV. So whilst I have “hard copy” as it were of my movie collection, the collection as a whole is not being backed up.
Taking into account the storage I would need, 4TB is sufficient so I opted for this Western Digital model as having a good price/storage ratio.

When the unit arrived I noticed a small tick on the outside of the packaging indicating W10. This is quite small and could easily be missed. Now I don’t know if this has anything to do with a small issue I found, but considering I use two laptops of almost equal specification – SSD drive as drive 1 with the OS, i7 processors of more or less equal speed, and 16GB of RAM, the performance difference between the two laptops was pronounced, and it surprised me. My W7 laptop, i7 2.4Ghz, running Home Premium 64 bit is coming up to 4 years old, whereas my newer Acer V15 Nitro is last year’s model and runs W10 Home, i7 2.6Ghz. Both laptops are equipped with USB3 ports. The older laptop uses DDR3 and the Acer DDR4 for which Acer claims faster data transit.

First up was the W7 laptop to which I had connected one of the Toshiba USB3 hard drives to transfer my movie collection. The transfer speed was not as fast as I was anticipating and soon realised that transferring the 4TB of data from both Toshiba drives would take a lot longer than I was expecting. So I quickly connected the drives to my V15 Nitro to do a check, and the result was like chalk and cheese. File transfer now simply zipped along at quite an impressive rate. I’m no IT expert, but it does look like the combination of W10 + DDR4 makes a considerable difference. I’d sure appreciate it if an IT expert could explain it to me.

Taken all in, the WD 4TB Elements seems to have been a good buy, but only time will tell how reliable it is. It looks like it is intended to be used standing vertically as the rubber feet are on its base. It does have an on/off switch but I’ve not worked out why as switching on and off is controlled by the laptop via the USB3 port.