Here's CNET's... Don't know what to watch tonight? The 4 TB My Book is the most cost-effective drive we found at the time of our research and writing. The Elements is about as fast as our top pick: In our tests, its average write speed was 7.7 MB/s slower, and it took about 5 seconds longer to transfer a Blu-ray film, but those differences were within the margin of error. If this is an issue youâre facing, too, check out our instructions on how to do this. Itâs a reliable drive, although it isnât quite as fast as our top pick. Wirecutter staffers have used the WD My Book in varying capacities over the years. The compact design offers up to 14TB capacity, making WD Elements desktop storage the ideal solution for easy, add-on storage of all your important photos, music, videos and files. We found just five reported failures out of 168 Amazon reviews for the Elements 4 TB option, giving this external hard drive a 3 percent failure rate. WD Elements 4TB USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drive Black - Newegg.com Transparent OLED: See-through TV comes to tomorrow's beds, restaurants, subways, The all-digital CES continues on Tuesday, here's how you can watch it all on CNET, CNET Labs' USB 3.0 external drive performance, Twitter permanently suspends Trump's account, Why now is the worst time to buy the Samsung Galaxy S20, Discuss: WD Elements Portable drive review: Large, affordable and versatile, Windows XP or later; Mac OS 10.4 or later. The 8 TB My Book is cheaper, as of this writing, and available at more retailers than the 8 TB WD Easystore. At three years of service, the failure rate jumps to almost 12 percent. We also timed the file transfer of a 45.5 GB rip of a Blu-ray movie from start to finish, running each transfer three times and determining the average to rule out performance hiccups. Here are some of the best Netflix has to offer. According to statistics from cloud backup service Backblaze, hard drives are most likely to fail either within the first 18 months of use or after three years. Also, because of the limited information available in some reviews, it can be hard to differentiate between hardware failures and software issues or user errors that could cause problems with a drive. The 8 TB My Book includes the same backup software as our top pick. Neither of these research methods is a perfect indicator of the My Bookâs reliability, but they are the best we have. If you spend most of your time working at one desk, you should get a desktop external drive. We recently bought into a number of these WD Elements 8TB External USB 3.0 HDDâs for various benchmarks and ⦠I was able to shuck the drive from the enclosure and find a White label WD80EMAZ drive which is nearly identical to the RED labeled drive that is sought ⦠Most of the drives we tested performed similarly, with the 4 TB WD My Book having a slight edge in most of our tests. But curiously, another choice comes from another line at Western Digital, the Elements Desktop Drive. For anyone who still needs an optical drive, the Asus ZenDrive U9M is the best DVD-only option, and the LG BP60NB10 is the best choice for Blu-ray discs. Wirecutter video producer Hunter Boone owns the 4 TB My Book; he says that itâs been very reliable for sync and back-up, too. 5.0 out of 5 stars Had a WD White Label drive in it. For each one, we ran HD Tune Pro, a benchmarking program that tests transfer speeds and access time across the entire disk. Itâs a reliable drive, although it isnât quite as fast as our top pick. Another fantastic storage solution coming from Western Digital (WD). Here are some of the best movies Netflix has to offer. Compared with our 8 TB pick, it was 17.4 MB/s slower in the HD Tune read test, and 31.2 MB/s slower in the write test. If you can find it for less than our current 8 TB pick, we encourage you to buy it; this model was the fastest 8 TB external hard drive in our HD Tune tests and Time Machine testing. Also, in my opinion, the Elements is slightly better-looking. Since the Element houses a low-power internal drive, I didn't expect it to blow me away with its performance, but the drive did quite well in testing nonetheless. *At the time of publishing, the price was $101. If youâre not backing up the important documents and photos on your computer, you should start. Although other external hard drives we tested (such as our runner-up pick) were similarly slow when writing files, none of them were as slow as the Seagate at reading them. While the 4 TB versionâs price is often double that of our top picks (around $200), the 8 TB modelâs price appears to fluctuate: The 8 TB Easystore cost around $160 as of this writing, but weâve previously seen it cost up $300. The WD My Book Desktop Hard Drive. It performed well in Blu-ray testing against our other 8 TB options and did fine in Time Machine tests, but it was notably slow during the HD Tune test. This result was better than that for the 8 TB Seagate we tested, which had an 11 percent reported failure rate, or 62 noted failures out of 570 reviews on Amazon. The 8 TB Seagate Backup Plus Hub faced problems similar to those of the 4 TB model. Most of the drives performed similarly in these tests, except for the 4 TB Seagate Backup Plus Hub, which was notably slower. WD Elements 6TB USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drive Black - Newegg.com Right now, that means the 4 TB WD My Book. Like our top pick, the higher-capacity WD My Book has a low, 6 percent reported failure rate (judging from Amazon reviews), and it performed the best of the three 8 TB options we tested. You can also use WD Drive Utilities to check for potential drive failures, major performance problems, and bad sectors on the My Book. Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for WD 14TB Elements Desktop External Hard Drive - USB 3.0 at Amazon.com. © 2021 Wirecutter, Inc., A New York Times Company, Western Digital WD Elements Desktop (4 TB), If you need more storage: WD My Book (8 TB), statistics from cloud backup service Backblaze, The Best External Optical Drives for DVDs and Blu-rays. After a new round of testing hard drives in 2020, we found that the 2 TB Seagate Backup Plus Slim is still the best portable hard drive for most people. If the 4 TB My Book is unavailable, or if its price goes up, WDâs 4 TB Elements desktop drive is a great second choice. Personally, I'm totally happy with the WD Elements Portable drive and have no problems recommending it to most people. Like our top pick, this drive did not get hot during testing, although it did make a little humming noise from time to time. âMy WD Elements has been great,â updates editor Michael J Kennelly told us, before adding: â...for storing all the video files of British sci-fi I torrented illegally and burnt to DVDs when I was in high school.â. (That drive, however, costs considerably more.). It was about as fast as the competition in all of our tests, itâs the least expensive drive we tested at this writing, and it has a longer warranty (three years) than the other contenders. Because the two drives appeared to be the same otherwise, we dismissed them. The 8 TB version of the Western Digital My Book offers reliability, fast transfer speeds, and more storage than our other picks. About half the drives we tested for this update are new, so they didnât have many Amazon reviews. Western Digitalâs 4 TB My Book is the best desktop hard drive for most people because itâs reliable and it offers the best balance of speed and price. The Elements' lack of features can be a good thing. At this writing, it costs only 46¢ more per terabyte, but prices fluctuate; if you find the Elements for less than the My Book, itâs a better buy. In our Blu-ray transfer test, all of the 4 TB drives we tested were within the margin of error of one another, but the 5 TB Toshiba Canvio was about 30 seconds faster than the competition. So WD Elements Desktop, while being a pricier option, tends to get more favorable â reviews than the $45 WD Elements, as seen on the chart below. Although it was technically the slowest of the three 8 TB models we tested in this regard, all three performed within 15 seconds of one another in this test. These factors arenât dealbreakers, but they are good to keep in mind. Justin Krajeski is a staff writer reporting on everyday carry at Wirecutter. Customers like WD Elements Desktop noticeably more WD Elements Desktop, the pricier option, tends to get more favorable reviews than Seagate Expansion Desktop Portable [ 4.6 vs 4.5 ]. While the two drives are very similar in most aspects, the Expansion is faster but the Element is cheaper. This has been designed ⦠Searching for a great show to binge? âWhen Iâm done with video projects that arenât that important to meâbut I want to keep the original videos so I can eventually add them to my reelâitâs a great tool to free up some space on my Thunderbolt-editing drives.â, Wirecutter senior editor Nathan Edwards has owned the 6 TB version of the drive for more than a year, and he says: âIt's quieter than my old backup drive and relatively good-looking. Apart from Windows and Mac computers, where the Elements worked without any issues, I also tried it with a few non-computer hosts; it proved to be compatible there as well. We donât think the jump in speed is worth spending that much more money for most people, because it didnât offer a noticeable improvement. Although prices on hard drives fluctuate frequently, our pick was the least expensive in its competitive field: At the time, it cost around $96, or $24 per terabyte, while the majority of the drives we tested cost more than $100. Via USB 3.0, it registered a sustained real-world copy speed of more than 95MBps for writing and more than 100MBps for reading. Currently the 8 TB My Book costs about $70 more than our top pick, though, so we recommend it only if you want the extra storage. Learn more. If the 4 TB My Book is unavailable, or if its price goes up, WDâs 4 TB Elements desktop drive is a great second choice. In our Blu-ray transfer tests, the 8 TB WD My Book was quickâit read a large Blu-ray video file in 4 minutes, 28 seconds and wrote that file in 4 minutes, 27 seconds. It outperformed the WD My Book in most of our tests, but it costs nearly $20 more as of this writing. So WD Elements Desktop, while being a cheaper option, tends to get more favorable â reviews than the $149 WD My Book, as seen on the chart below. Other drives from G-Tech, LaCie, OWC, and Transcend were too expensive, ranging from $140 to $420 for 4 TB modelsâ1.4 to 4.2 times as much as our top pick. It was significantly faster than the Seagate model in this test, but a little slower than the WD Easystore, falling short by 12.3 MB/s on reads and 5 MB/s on writes. This is advertised as a durable desktop hard drive but with no specific details. But this approach is the best we have for now. There are a wide range ⦠A desktop external hard drive is a great local backup for a computer that mostly stays parked on a desk. And when we backed up to the Elements with Time Machine, it was the second-fastest drive we tested, falling just behind our top pick. Read honest and unbiased product reviews from our ⦠If you want more spaceâsay, you have a ton of large photos or videos or an existing media library and need room to expand in the futureâWestern Digitalâs 8 TB My Book is the best option. Since it ⦠My Passport. If you don't plan on using it to store sensitive data, this is an excellent drive to choose. At four years, the failure rate is 20 percent. This method has shortcomings: For one, people are more likely to post a review when they have a problem. A password-protected drive, for example, will need its host to run software to enable you to type in the password before it can get connected. While reading through 326 Amazon reviews of the 8 TB My Book, we found only 20 reviewsâor 6 percentâthat mentioned drive failure. However, these were some 20MBps slower than those of the Seagate Expansion. If you see the price on the Easystore come down, though, itâs worth buying. You can activate 256-AES encryption by downloading WDâs Security software, enabling it, and setting a password. The Element also worked well with routers and media network media players. ... Western Digital WD Elements Desktop. It is 4.3 x 3.2 x 0.6 inches. Just backing up to one or the other isnât enough; having both on-site and cloud backups ensures that your data stays safe from localized threats such as fire, theft, or natural disaster, as well as Internet outages or disruptions to the cloud backup provider. This ⦠High capacity in a compact design. He carries things every day. The My Book also landed in the middle of the pack when backing up via Time Machine, storing 37.8 GB in 25 minutes, 49 seconds. The 4 TB My Book is reliable, fast, and cheaper than the competition. On top of that, it's fairly safe to say that WD Elements Desktop is a more popular external hard drive, based on its 5,000+ reviews⦠After 20 hours of new research and testing, we found that the best external desktop hard drive for most people is Western Digitalâs 4 TB My Book. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for WD Elements Desktop Hard Drive at Amazon.com. Buy it on Amazon: https://amzn.to/2YxmzPlMy Setup Gear: https://amzn.to/35mYQpXThis WD 4TB portable hard drive is one the best in the market! We found the speed differences between them to be small: All but one of our finalists performed within about 20 seconds of one another when transferring a Blu-ray movie, and all completed a Time Machine backup within 4 minutes of one another. The WD Elements Portable drive is an excellent alternative to the Seagate Expansion. Not sure what to watch on Amazon tonight? He previously wrote about tech at Wirecutter. Ideally, an external hard drive is something you donât notice much. Every hard drive we tested is adequate for the task of backing up your computer; only minor differences in speed, price, warranty, and included software differentiate them. Judging from five years of data, Backblaze estimates that more than half of hard drives will last six years. Itâs a modern-looking hard drive in matte black with rounded edges. It should sit on your desk, quietly spinning away, storing and backing up your data without a lot of setup or ongoing maintenance. Note that the WD Elements also works with USB 2.0 but at much slower speeds; in the neighborhood of 30MBps for both writing and reading. The WD Elements Desktop Hard Drive. Thatâs a lower failure rate than our top pick has, but the Elements has roughly half as many reviews at this writing, so the reported failure rate may not be comparable. The WD Elements range provides reliable high capacity storage with USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 compatibility. If you need more storage, we recommend the Western Digital 8 TB My Book. About 5 percent of drives fail in the first 18 months of use, with the failure rate dipping to about 1.5 percent for another 18 months. You should consider replacing your backup drives between the third and sixth year of use. © 2021 CNET, A RED VENTURES COMPANY. The difference in transfer time wasnât substantial in any of our tests, though, and it costs about the same as the My Book per terabyte. To NTFS USB 3.0, it registered a sustained real-world copy speed of more than 95MBps for and. Desktop was significantly slower than our top pick, but its warranty doesnât last as long than our top,. Excellent drive to choose and writing is slightly better-looking than those of the desktop we! This update are wd elements desktop review, so they didnât have many Amazon reviews of the Bookâs! 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