WD - easystore® 4TB External USB 3.0 Hard Drive - Black

The WD My Book 4 TB is a fast and capable storage solution for backups, "archive" files, and other data. I plan to use it to store my Adobe Light Room archives and working copies. Western Digital is, by common agreement, the most reliable and powerful brand of hard drive on the market to day, and this device continues their tradition of delivering the best. Although I'm giving a rating of five stars, I'd like to point out a limitation of this drive that's due to operating systems rather than the drive itself. If you plan to use this drive only with Windows, then you can allocate all 4 TB as a single primary partition. If, however, you want to be able to use the drive with Windows and with OS X, then you'll have to use 2 partitions. The reason is that the Windows NTFS file system supports 4 TB partitions, but the multi-platform exFAT file system that works with both Windows and OS X only supports 2 TB. If you use exFat to use the drive with both OSes, then you'll have to split the drive into two partitions. You do have the choice of making the two partitions equal sizes. I have a shelf full of theses drives from 1TB to 8TB and I swear by them. I do not leave them plugged in except when loading or unloading them. No need to run them hours on end for no reason. I would buy them over and over again.

I am very satisfied with this product. Keep in mind it is not a portable device. It must be plugged into an outlet. This doesn't bother me. I'm not an expert, but I suspect it may perform better not relying solely on a USB cable for powder. 4 TB of storage is great and connecting to the Xbox One X was really simple. Just plug it in and the Xbox will recognize the hard drive and prompt you to format the hard drive. Done in seconds. The unit isn't very large and is attractive in appearance. Looks good next to the Xbox. Most important to me is the ability to run games directly from the external hard drive. I have run Battle Field 4, Battlefield 1, and Halo 5 including multiplayer directly from the hard drive and have compared it to the performance running from the built in Xbox One X hard drive. They look and play the same. No issues. Down load speeds and transferring games between drives seem pretty reasonable. Get this one sale if you can and you can't go wrong.

I have seen similar drives like this on Amazon but in this case, the WD - easystore® 4TB External USB 3.0 Hard Drive - Black is exclusive to Best Buy. I ordered it online and got free shipping. I have the drive formatted to ExFat so it's easily compatible with both Windows 10 (and previous Windows releases) and MacOS. Another advantage of ExFat is that I can store individual files larger than 4GB. I have movies, photos, and miscellaneous files that amount to roughly 3 Terabytes saved on this one drive. That's right Terabytes, not Gigabytes. Honestly, it might have been better to buy a NAS (Network Attached Storage) instead of this in my case for the amount of data that I store and have backed up. Oh well, I still have a thousand Gigabytes left free. With USB 3.0, the file transfer is fast and I can even play video files directly from the external drive. One gripe I have is that this thing needs external power to run through a wall outlet, so it's not good for travelling like using it when on a plane ride. I highly recommend this for people that need fast and large storage drives and stationary setups where having an extra power outlet is not an issue.

Our studios use offsite voice talent for many things throughout the day, 24/7 and our offsite hosts need reliable backup in case they have a failure of their main studio PCs. This unit was pretty much plug and play, the backup started immediately after the drive installed it's own backup software. We did not opt to use the "cloud" backup associated with it, as a local drive for "grab and go" in emergencies was enough, and it's main purpose is to protect from drive failure in main computer. Reports back to us are that this drive works GREAT for that, especially easy if you are keeping your documents, video, audio, and "standard" type files in their windows-designated folders so the automatic settings work without intervention. However, you can set the folders you want backed up manually if you wish to be more selective of have saved files to non-standard locations. Recommended for easy windows-based backups, and we prefer the drives with their own power supplies over USB-only units for stability and less power being pulled from the PC's ports. Works well for us overall!

These are Western Digital Reds with a normal SATA connector when taken apart. The USB "proprietary" connector the other reviewer is talking about is *NOT* this drive (he / she is referring to the 2.5 inch portable drive with the same name). I bought a total of 5 (three from one store, and two from another - due to best buy's non-business purchase limitations) and they all turned out to be Western Digital Reds. The bare drive does show it has a 2 year warranty, but it's description is "WD easystore Desktop" with a model number of "WDBCKA0040HBK" when you do a warranty check on the WD website. All of mine are model: WD40EFRX & have NASware 3.0, with a mfg. date of March 2nd, 2017.

Bought one of these about 6 months ago for standard backup, still running fine. Decided to buy a second one on black Friday for 99.99 but for some dumb reason a day later they refunded it. At first I was annoyed thinking I'd lost my deal, then I log in to find it's now down to 89.99 on I guess slightly-blacker Sunday? Decided to just walk into the store and buy it there since BB doesn't like my money online. Worked out well for me, price wise at least. :) Oh and those of you looking to shuck this, they are now standard blue drives, no more super cheap nas reds. I'm still going to take the chance and install them in a nas box and see how they do. Figure I'll just swap these in and throw my old 3tb drives in these cases to use as redundancies. Can't beat the price even if you buy the blue drive by itself on am-azon!

I bought this with the sole purpose of expanding my PS4. I soon discovered that a 500GB drive for PS4 is insufficient if you have a tendency not to delete games you played. At most I think I had 8 games with various GB needs. The time soon came to where what can I delete and not miss to load my latest game. Ugh... after 2-4 times of this I decided I needed to inflate my storage capacity. After little research, I found this drive in addition to finding at an awesome price. I pulled the trigger and am pleased with the results. The only thing I noticed was the sound of the drive as it is active. Not terribly loud but noticeable. Not a deal breaker at all. What really made this a nice purchase was the ease of installation. I followed the guidelines via the PS set up. Only took a few moments and nearly instant 4TB of more storage... Woohoo!

After several attempts, I may have to return this drive as the included backup software simply doesn't work. Before purchasing this, just google: “Unable to back up files to My Passport because there is not enough space”. This is a massive issue. I cannot comment otherwise on performance as I am struggling to get this to work despite different backup plans and formats. It has a decent price, but you lose that advantage in 1) it not working and 2) the time spent getting it to work. I've opened a ticket with WD, but as I have not heard back, I will return this to BB I'm afraid.