Customer Ratings & Reviews

This is the 5th External Hard Drive I've bought (all WD) and this is by far the best! 3TB for this price is amazing! I need lots of hard drive space as I DJ and do lots of studio recording. I can also easily and quickly connect these devices to everything from Computers to Rokus to my soundbar and watch and listen to everything!!!

I used this drive for about 4 and a half years. I bought it to store about 50 GB of games for my Wii U (wasteful given the 3 TB capacity, but Nintendo insisted you needed a drive like this with a dedicated power adapter). A few weeks ago, I repurposed the drive to backup computer files. I formatted the drive with Western Digital Drive Utilities in Windows 11 and ran a SMART test and full drive test, both of which passed. I then set up a weekly backup for my files in Acronis True Image for Western Digital. The second backup failed, and the drive no longer showed up in Windows. It was recognized in WD Drive Utilities, but the SMART test and drive check failed. I couldn’t format the drive either. I understand that hard drives fail after a number of years, but I didn’t expect it to fail after a few years of very light use and a week of normal use. Moreover, I expected a warning of some sort before the drive failed. There were no physical warning signs as far as I could tell, and neither Windows nor Western Digital’s own programs notified me of any issues until the drive died.

I had a difficult time installing the software for this product. First, programs mentioned in the manual were on the disk drive. I had to go to the support website to download the files. After expanding the files (.zip), The program still would execute or wouldn't execute. This is going back to Best Buy ASAP. The Support webpage was semi-helpful. It told you what was wrong, but offered no step-by-step procedures on how to resolve it. I was hoping to use this as a back up when converting from my PC (Windows 7) to an Apple.

I bought this to use as router-attached NAS. Backups to the drive kept failing, so I downloaded the utilities and did the full drive test. It failed twice. I exchanged it for another one. The second one failed too. That's two dead hard drives straight out of the box in a row. It could be a statistical anomaly, or WD may have a quality control problem with the redesign.