Customer Ratings & Reviews

WD backup drives are the most reliable ones i have used, I have both an 8TB and a 4TB one and they work perfectly. As a computer tech, I think everyone who uses a computer should have an external backup drive, the cost of data recovery in the event of a hard drive failure is astronomical, why pay $1000 to POSSIBLY recover your data from a failed drive when you can pay $100 (price ranges depending on capacity) for once of these and not have to worry about that

Lets first off start with pretty much everyone is moving to SSD storage drives. They are pretty much indestructible. But when an 8 Terabyte external hard drive made by one of the best drive companies is selling it for the price of a 1 -2 Terabyte SSD, I think thats a pretty good deal for a drive that won't be tossed and banged around. It should be pretty safe, for a while. Seems like a screaming deal to me.

Have had long positive history with this brand of external hard drives. This is no different and seems to be of the same quality as the others. Works great with Apple Macintosh computer too. Only downside is the software that came with it crashed while installing and was not a good experience overall. Recommend drive but would not install any of the software unless you need firmware update.

I'd been running a 4tb drive for years, and it was getting full. It was another WD drive, like this. Picking up the 8 tb was a question of balance - capacity vs price. This just hit that balance perfectly for me. Setting it up is, of course, plug-in-and-go simple. The WD software is a nice add on, and setting up a backup is easy. Pick what you need, how often you need to back up, and done. And of course... you need a backup. Online backups (like Backblaze) are great, and of course if the drive is stolen or damaged your backup *there* is safe - but being online, even with high speed connections, means that that initial backup (and any large changes) will take time to finish and to restore from. This drive is *right* there, runs over a fast USB 3 connection and is instantly accessible. If you can, use both, of course. This is not a NAS - you can't directly hook it up to the network - but I knew that going in. You can hook it up to (most) routers to share, or share it from your PC, but it's not natively network accessible. There are other products that will do that if that's what you're looking for. Since hooking it up, it's been rock solid and reliable. All I can ask for from an external drive.

This drive is employed on a TabloTV over the air PVR (DVR) system and was an upgrade as my 4TB unit was running out of space. It did not get commissioned until October of 2019, and has run flawlessly. The TABLO TV box uses a linux format, so any original software for backup included on this was of no use for us, and was erased in the formatting, but this drive does not seem to have a 'sleep" function which would delay the startup of recording audio and video from TV so it works fine in this capacity. Its quiet, doesn't seem to get too hout, but as with any external hard drive, if you've got the means to put a small fan in close proximity to the drive, COOL IS ALWAYS GOOD for hard drives and will help extend the life of this physically spinning style of drive. Once SSD's of this size come down to an affordable price, there'll be less heat issues, but for now, consider this a GREAT value, especially when on sale, and good solid storage.

This is the fourth WD drive I've purchased over the years and this one hopefully will be as reliable as all the others. My oldest one (maybe 10 yrs old) does hiccup once in a while and has lost data because of power surges, but now that it's on an APU it still works great. I use this new unit for both backup and data storage for four computers and two external drives, and it still has plenty of room left over. I am pretty certain that this one will be as reliable as the others that I have, and I'd definitely buy another one of these when the need arises.

I purchased this drive with the express purpose of opening up the case to remove the internal drive to put into a desktop Mac. Anyone else looking to do something similar, you'd be crazy to buy a bare internal drive for they cost much more for the same type of drive. There are plenty of videos on YouTube showing how to pop open these drives. This one in particular is insanely easy with a few tools (compared to some I've dismantled). As an external drive, it's as one may expect. It's plug and play with a Mac. Reformat or not, delete the included software. If you're setting up a backup for your Mac use Time Machine or a third party backup application. It has a USB 3.1 micro-B 10 pin on the drive (that's the two loop, smashed "B" looking connector). I'll note that though it's part of the MyBook line of externals that it is squared off. Nice drive but no longer emulates the look of an actual book. Though my purchase was for the greater capacity drive I did put an older, smaller capacity drive in the enclosure and use it as it's meant to be. I have no issues with it. I'd recommend as is or if you're looking to dismantle. One note: my aging Mac Pro has issues recognizing the high capacity drive sometimes when installed, HOWEVER, reading any drive from the enclosure works fine (only slower due to external and spin up time for the platters).

Good product, but didn't align with my needs. I was building a home lab, and I needed additional secure storage, but this product is not built to load programs from; I upgraded my SSD and RAM instead.

I had bought a WD 5TB external USB from BB and it had failed on me a few months later so I was looking for a solution that used an external power source. A visit to my nearest Best Buy brought me to this item here. It was within the price range that I was looking for and what I think is still a good buy. The reason why it looses one whole star is because Seagate and Best Buy have another 8TB External drive for at the same the same price. However ! The Seagate has two USB ports in front, including the HDD port in the back! Why I still think this is a good buy however is because this model is far less noisy than the one that eventually replaced it. Had I known that before hand I would have thought a lot harder before allowing the return window to close.

Backup external drive adequate space and easy to load. Use this one as my drive for all information entered into my computer. This way my data us saved in two places.

It's pretty easy to use but the software is somewhat confusing. I had been using a toaster-type external drive and I like that this is enclosed.

8 TB's of storage. This is a quality product, easy to hook-up and use. No problems with it. Very efficient and holds a ton of data. The price I paid was very reasonable!

This drive is great and is fairly fast with transfers. There is a strange new louder noise with this drive but after reading about it, the noise comes from the different seek techniques that WD uses with the larger TB hard drives and the new Helium filled drives. This is a great drive for that backup that you have set to just auto backup every week (You do have that setup right?) so that in the event of a tragedy you can get back to where you need to be fast. This also allows you (if ever needed) to have a back up copy of everything that you can take with you at a moments notice if in a disaster zone and need to evacuate.

I bought this for my husband. For his back-up to the Back-up of his millions of photo's that we take when on vacations. With all after fixing pictures stored on this drive. Great piece of mind knowing we have a full backup if something should happen to the other smaller WD External Drives.

Western digitial is one of the better HD providers. They seem to be very long lasting. I've had a number of HD drives, and never had a problem with any of them.

This hard drive was exceptional during a 7 month deployment. I was able to store over 1,866 movies, a vast collection of television series, and multiple documents with plenty of room to spare. It was very easy to use, endured the wear and tear of daily handling, and did not malfunction at any point. It was my saving grace at sea! One of my Sailors ended up purchasing one as well after using mine.

Great for PC backups and home network. Store old digital photos and keep safe.

I am very happy with my purchase of this external hard drive. I use it to store my thousands of photos and all of my school homework, so I know everything is safe in case anything happens to my computer. It is easy to use.

The internal drive is sata. I pulled it out and put it in my server. The usb board can be used on any sata drive. It's a proper drive controller. Got it on sale and it works as a drive to store my raw video files and cad files. I got a few of these running in raid and they work nicely in my 1u rackmount server.

Nice amount of space for the price. Easy to set up for a Mac.