Customer Ratings & Reviews

This ext hard drive has been great as I'm able to store on it a lot of MP4 videos, WAV & MP3 audio files that I work with for my marketing and sales job. Otherwise my 2 GB SSD would have filled up a long time ago. It does need some time (3-4 seconds) to 'spin up' if you haven't accessed it in a while. And it does make some soft 'sounds' at points in the day but nothing distracting or loud enough that ambient office noise doesn't drown out. Would buy another one again as this fills up! 3TB used so far w/ 12 TB left.

Overall it’s an excellent external drive. It is a little noisy; clicks, wirrrrrs and makes other noises. It’s a little slow on file acquisition and display. I have three other 8TB WD’s and they all perform about the same. As I’ve said, overall, I’m satisfied with their performance.

I liked my Western digital 14TB Easystore so much that I ended up purchasing the 16TB version as well. Usable space after formatting with NTFS was 12.5TB. This 16TB drive runs slightly faster on average then my 14TB version according to CrystalDiskMark. It was on sale when I purchased it on 4/2021 at $267. As of 6/2021 it is on sale at $450. So glad I purchased it when I did.

Great Price for 16TB of Storage! I own 4 and they work Great. Plug and Play. Easy to use. All purpose Storage and playback. 5 Star Quality. Extremely Quiet! Can't even hear it.

Easy setup. Quiet. A lot of storage at a great price. Fast data transfer.

Tons of storage for all your videos music pictures and more. I have this as a backup storage on my gaming pc. Best part about this HD, it's very quite and works on both mac OS and PC. Also easy to install.

Fast, but noisy. Ive bought WD HDDs and almost had zero problems. You can shuck it and use as internal.

Surprised that no in depth review of this has been mentioned yet and how well this 16TB external drive does with a Xbox gaming console. I can definitely guarantee that this works on an Xbox One X Project Scorpio Edition and most likely a Series X/S console in the future when I get one. I’m holding out for a cool Limited Edition Series X with at least 2TB built in storage. For the amount of storage I wanted so far this works great at the awesome sale price of $259 bought on MARIO DAY 3/10/21. I’d rather have a SSD external, but after doing research for this capacity and blazing fast downloads it would cost me $1700. Brands are not even making a single SSD that size [except one @$510 I found. Unreliable new company on the market. On Amazon]for a reasonable price consumer purchase anyway. I would have to buy two separate 8TB SSDs for the one I truly want. Pros: 1) Incredibly easy setup plug and format for Games and Apps storage. 2) Massive size capacity - 600+ games w/9TB still free of 14.6TB total (1.4TB used for format Microsoft Xbox OS) 3) Fast download and transfer speeds. Hitting upwards of over 200Mbps. (Varies with Internet service) Very fast game load times. 4) Good size for travel and display. Bright light showing downloads working properly. 5) Should last a very long time. My previous Xbox One external HDD WD My Book that I switched from and still working was purchased in 2013-2014 6) Trusted reliable brand and model that works very well with Xbox consoles. Cons: 1) For the price and modern day change of technology we live in it’s a drag that this is not a 7200 rpm drive and 3.1 USB cable. No excuses there WD. 2) Still requires an adapter for power. I believe after a certain size threshold external HDD has to have one. 3) Can be slightly noisy and flashy bright light if that stuff annoys you, but not too much of a drastic change from my previous WD My Book. For this size capacity and price per TB it’s a minor issue for me IMO. 4) The 18TB version will not work with Xbox consoles if you’re thinking about it for Games & Apps format only. As of 1/20/21 last time checked—It will reject not allow!! For some weird reason years ago Microsoft Xbox OS designed it that way to cap off at only 16TB individual external HD games storage and don’t plan to upgrade change that limitation. Which is extremely misleading information according to their format game instructions on Xbox game console. No mention of a cap off TB individual external HD limits for Games and Apps. Very disappointed about that. I’m overall really happy with my purchase. I don’t have to worry anymore with removing and trying to make room for other titles. This comes in extremely handy for those using or interested in Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. Highly recommended and a Fantastic service for content, price, ease of use, and value.

This is a great little drive: It has a massive amount of storage at a very reasonable price (if you can catch it on sale - at full price, I wouldn't say that it was worth the dollar to TB ratio simply because of the faults I found which I've detailed below), in a relatively small and attractive package, was plug and play and thoroughly easy to use even without installing the Western Digital software that came with the drive (I also did not have to format it out of the box, although on a Mac you will assuming you don't have an NTFS driver installed on your Mac). I gave it four stars because of two things. Please read on to learn more: PLEASE NOTE: The read and write speeds and temperature readings demonstrated below were not achieved with 'laboratory software'; these were real world values that someone copying or moving large HD or UHD video files (or other similarly large files) to the drive may experience. The first reason I docked a quarter star is the write speeds the drive demonstrates. Although nowhere near abysmal, they are not as fast as it's 12TB brother across the same USB 3.0 hub on a different port (I may be able to squeeze a little more write performance out of it by connecting it directly to my PC, but I haven't tried that yet as the performance is satisfactory for my needs - that's it was only worth a quarter star). The 12TB easystore WD hard drive pulls a Windows Average of 198-220 MBs writing where the 16TB drive only comes in at around a Windows average of 123 MBs writing under load (i.e., large file transfers of +10GB or bigger). It's not bad just not as fast as I was expecting nor was it as fast as the smaller drive which surprised me a bit. Read performance is stellar: Windows average of around 300 MBs to an internal SSD across the same USB hub. Again, the 12 TB drive is a bit faster across the same hub, different port, but not by enough to complain about. So not much to bring up on the read side of things. The other three-quarters of a star I knocked off because of how hot this drive runs. And this drives runs HOT! Very hot. Particularly under load. Small file copies are not a problem... I saw no discernable temperature increase when copying small files, even large numbers of small files, but when larger files (i.e., +10 GB or greater) are being copied or moved, the temperature climbs rapidly. When I first started moving files to the drive from my internal SSD, the temp readings on the WD drive shot from a balmy 32c to a whopping 58c in about three minutes and continued to climb from there. It got so hot, in fact, that I was afraid the drive was going to cook itself if I didn't find a way to cool it down (I mean, beyond shutting off the file move - which I ultimately had to do until I found a way to cool the drive). The problem was easy enough solved: I had an extra table fan that I sat the hard drive on top of to force copious amounts of air through the hard drive case and that brought the temps back into a much more normal range of 30c-35c. So if you are planning on getting this drive, get some form of active cooling with it (a fan to sit on top of or underneath it, something to force large amounts of air through the case to sync the heat away from the drive) if you're going to be putting it under heavy load because it will heat up very quickly to a point that hard drives should not heat up to. All-In-All, I'm very pleased with this drive. Again, large capacity, easy on the wallet, and hey it's fits with the black decor of my rig. If you catch it on sale, I highly recommend it (with an active cooling solution, of course).

Purchased 2 of these drives, both for use with Xbox Series X game consoles. I want to love these competitively priced drives, but I have mixed feelings. Pros: - Xbox Series X consoles accept a maximum external drive size of 16TB, so these drives were perfect for this application. - Speed is adequate to play games directly from the drive. Cons: - Both WD drives are noticeably noisier than the pre-existing Seagate externals I already have connected to the consoles. They click and whir seemingly at random. - There's an internal flashing light that shines through the ventilation grill on the top of the drive, when in the upright position. This light projects onto the ceiling of the room - very annoying. - Neither drive shuts off when I shut off the consoles, despite selecting the "shut off drives" option on the consoles. The drives whir and click and flash light at all hours. Don't know if this is a drive problem or a console problem, though this is the first drive I've had this problem with. Bottom Line: I won't be being this model again, unless it will be in an area where noise and extraneous light isn't a concern. TLDR: Drive speeds are satisfactory and price was right. Drives are noisy and have an internal flashing light that shines brightly through the top ventilation grill. Unlikely to buy again.

Great shuckable drives. These are white label helium-enclosed CMR drives with the same hardware code as the Ultratsar HC550. These drives likely have different firmware to lower performance. I've shucked 13 of the 10TB model, 12 of the 16TB model, and 8 of the 14TB model. None were DOA and I haven't seen a single bad sector on any of the drives. Due to the helium-sealed enclosure, these disks idle at around 5-5.5W (~0.4W/TB) versus 2.5W/TB on my 4 TB 7200 RPM air HGST drives. They also run cooler than the air drives. As these drives are CMR, they can be used with good performance for ZFS or hardware/software RAID. I'm using these drives in a ZFS pool. Note: SMART shows that these are 5400 RPM drives but acoustic analysis indicates they spin at 7200 RPM.

I was somewhat concerned with various negative reviews about noise and slow transfer speed. But I went ahead with the purchase because I have had good experience with WD drives before. Well, I'm extremely happy with this drive. It's quiet and fast (much better than my 8TB Seagate drive). It is true that it goes to sleep after a while. You have to wait for it to wake up. If that bothers you, you may not want to buy it. I find it tolerable. I also want to acknowledge the great curbside pickup at Best Buy.

I've owned many different external hard drives over the years, this is by far the largest (in storage size) I've had. Western Digital makes good-quality drives (never had one fail yet), some are faster than others, but this one seems fairly fast and only has a bit of lag accessing it if you haven't accessed it in a while. Tons of storage, so this should keep all my files backed up for quite a while.

The drive itself is exactly as advertised, and since I am a reviewing it alone I am giving the product 5 stars. This is a very economical way to get a large amount of memory and is designed to have a very low space footprint in your space. However, Roadie was an incredible pain, state my item had been delivered when it hadn't been, and then it showed up on my porch more than 24 hours after the first delivery was said to be completed. I would avoid using them and go with other, more standard and insured shipping options.

Bought this to replace a 6 TB Seagate drive that kept disconnecting from my network. I should have trusted that WD would be a superior product. I am so happy with this purchase, especially on sale. The capacity is huge, so this drive can hold several months’ worth of backups. It’s quick and I don’t find it loud (although I’m not picky about that kind of thing since my backups run at night). I didn’t use or load the included WD software because it doesn’t serve my purposes. For the $/TB and quality, you can’t beat this product!

It's big enough for all my data. Easy to set up and use. Pretty reliable so far. It's a good place for all your back up data.

Terrific value for the capacity. Dependable name brand. Even shuckable if so inclined. Word of warning if you do decide to shuck this drive - no idea what will happen with the warranty and keep in mind that this is a plastic case with breakable tabs (don't expect to get into the unit without damaging the tabs). A little over a month of use and no issues. Works as designed and plenty of capacity for my needs.

Works well, good storage for the price. Drive will work externally or internally.

I love the price point and the sleek look of this desktop drive, but its VERY noisy. I was concerned that I may have a defective unit until I ran a few Google searches and realized this is absolutely normal for this drive. Although my concerns were voiced by many others online, even those that send the drives back under warranty thinking they were bad received a replacement drive that made the exact same noises. Bottom line, great drive, but makes unusually loud mechanical and chirping sounds, moreso that you would expect even from an inexpensive drive. Still give it 4 stars before its good value fort the money.

love this. great storage capacity, easy to use and price was affordable. been looking for a while for a nice back up device. would buy again thank you best buy