WD - Easystore 5TB USB 3.0 External Portable Hard Drive - Black

W.D makes this quality product simple and easy to use. Take it out of the box, connect the USB cord to the hard drive, then to the computer, once it’s recognized, it’s ready to backup whatever you may need/want to. It’s about the size of your hand, yet has a lot of storage space. Takes one USB 3.0 cord to power the device and transfer files, which is convenient. I also bought a W.D hard drive case for protection and storage when not in use. If you reformat it to ex-Fat, you’ll be able to use it on Windows & Mac. If you’re looking to be able to backup and/or transfer files on multiple devices (Desktop, Laptop, Tablet) and be able to put it into a fire proof safe w/o taking up much physical space, this is definitely worth the money and investment.

I purchased this 5TB portable hard drive to use as my main storage drive that runs a Plex Media Server, and has a torrent client running 24/7. Please note this is not my only backup, and I have a second WD Passport that has a copy of all my files that I use as cold storage - unplugged and sitting on my desk. I did not have the space or money to setup an actual NAS or 3.5" hard drives, so decided to go with this portable option for the price and portability. So far, things have been decent. I haven't had any real problems with this drive. As of today, CrystalDiskInfo shows that there are ZERO reallocated sectors (bad sectors) after being powered on for 2,439 hours, and powered on a total of 76 times. So it hasn't failed yet after 3 months. The main drawback to this drive is the speed - it is only a 4800 RPM drive - slower than your typical laptop hard drive, much slower than a 3.5" 7200 RPM drive, and much, MUCH slower than a modern SSD or m.2 drive. You can see in my CrystalDiskMark results that average read/write rates are 40 MB/s with 4TB of data written to the drive. But it performs okay - I never have issues using Plex on my devices, but that's only from a single device. You may run into issues when running multiple streams. Also the drive can slow down a bit if you're trying to write a bunch of data and at the same time read a bunch of data (like you're downloading files from a torrent client, while the torrent client is also checking the hash of other files). But the drive remains responsive - if I pause a transfer then I immediately can perform other functions. Just something to be aware of. Idle temperatures are in the mid 30's C, and in testing 1GB being written the temp only rose to 40 C. Temps ran high when straight writing data to it (3TB of data) when I first got it - hovering around 70 C. The case does not have any ventilation so this could be an issue if you're heavily using this drive (premature failure due to heat). The last issue with this drive is that it CANNOT be shucked, and if the USB/SATA interface ever fails then you won't be able to pull data off of the drive since it is hard soldered to the motherboard inside the enclosure. Overall, this is a decent drive - as long as you understand the limitations and don't use this as a long term storage plan. For me it's cheap storage that will hold files until I can get a NAS or some 3.5" drives set up. Using this as a game drive for a PS4 or Xbox, or even to hold Steam games isn't a bad idea. If you buy this drive to store valuable or precious data, you should buy a second one of the same size so you can have a backup if anything goes wrong. My WD Passport failed and was replaced under warranty, so it's something that does happen - it just hasn't happened to this drive yet. I wish I could give this 3.5/5 stars.

I'm a filmmaker, and I do my own editing, so I'm in constant need of portable drives with lots of space to use for transferring projects to different production departments, as well as to deliver finished films to distributors. These small but huge portable hard drives are perfect for what I need. Reliable with a great price.

Nice small footprint on this Hard Drive. Virtually plug N Play if you have the newest hardware & software. Pity it cant be used with Windows Vista and previous 'FAT' file systems as I wanted to directly back-up my retired PC's before they are recycled so I still chose/ had to use thumb drives to transfer to a compatible PC first before savi g on this srorage drive. If you are fairly new to PCs and have all new (1-5 years) equipment you should be fine. I have been archiving since Windows 3.1 so some of my file systems are antiquainted.

Directions were very straight forward almost self-explanatory. I had no problems plugging into a USB Hub. It started right up and I had 5TB ready to go. I liked it so much I got a second one a few days later.