WD 18TB Elements Desktop External Hard Drive - USB 3.0, Black

Fast and efficient data transfer. Small and compact, ideal for extra storage on my laptop.

Western Digital make great quality external hard drives and I have never had any issues with any of them...so far!touch woodI would always recommend getting a smaller size hard drive (4tb max size) if possible as they can fail and losing so much data (6tb+) can be difficult to take.I've also read that larger size hard drives are more likely to fail but cannot confirm this.These devices are incredibly easy to setup and use.Just plug in the USB cable and you're away.Note: I would highly recommend using a 3.0 usb slot when transferring large files.USB 3.0 does downgrade to USB 2.0 slots but the speeds are so much slower.If you dont have a usb 3.0 lot then use the 2.0 slot but if your desktop pc has multiple drives then make sure you use the faster 3.0 slot.As mentioned before, I can't fault these drives so far.My only concern is the varying write speeds. A few of the hard drives I have purchased seem to have much faster write speeds than others despite being the same model.I do not know why this is but others have mentioned possible cost cutting and use of slower drives/materials.It can be frustrating but isn't too bad on the whole, it just means waiting a few minutes more.Lastly, PLEASE DO NOT leave your hard drive on all the time!The heat generated will impact the drive and can lead to problems.These drives shouldn't be left unused for a long time but should NOT be used constantly as a seperate drive.They are for storage/backup of larger files to decrease file space on your pc/laptop.If you feel like the hard drive is getting hot or been on for a long time, then please safely eject the device and allow it to cool down.Overall I'm very happy with my purchase. Delivery was very fast and Amazon were much cheaper than any where else.I will definitely be buying another one in the future and hope Western Digital continue making high quality but affordable products like this.

Very compact and easy to use at a very competitive price for 2TB.I bought this specifically to take my PS4 games off the internal PS5 SSD but I didn't want to get a 'game drive' specific one as I would have more freedom if I wanted to partition it and backup some PC files as well.The setup couldn't have been easier, I took it out of the box, plugged it in and the PS5 recognised it instantly. I had to format the drive before I could use it which I thought might take a few minutes at most but only took 5 seconds, then I selected around 360GB of PS4 games/apps and started the transfer.After the format I had 1.8TB free which is more than enough and with all drives they need space for their base operating software which is usually a small fraction off the stated capacity, a lot of people clearly don't understand this from some of the reviews complaining they got less capacity than they purchased -_-The transfer was speed really good for a physical drive, better than I was expecting, it took just over an hour for it to finish moving the whole 350+GB to the external drive.My PS5 told me once that the drive wasn't removed properly after powering on after being in rest mode, I didn't remove the drive at all so I'm not sure why it said that. This error message has only come up once and happened the first time the console had been in rest mode with the new drive connected. The console has been in rest mode and turned off multiple times after this message and hasn't given me the error since so it may just be a one time thing.I'll update this review if I come across any issues.Loading PS4 games from the External as opposed to launching them from the internal SSD was a little bit slower. All times below were timed from the point of clicking resume on my game file to actually getting into the game.- Resident Evil 7 took 77sec to load which I'd played the day before on the PS5 SSD which probably took under 30 seconds. In-game the performance was perfect, no frame drop, no noticeable delay on textures rendering in.- Horizon Zero Dawn took 30-40sec which was actually quicker than RE7 despite being a huge open world game, the in-game performance was perfect too even with the 60FPS patch.- God of War took 29 seconds to load into the game.- Batman Arkham Knight took just 32 seconds to load my save and get into the game.- Mortal Shell took just 20 seconds to load into the game.- Call of Duty Modern Warfare took 56 seconds to load into the game from chapter selection.

I am 71 and know next to nothing anout computers, but I don't suppose I'm alone in that, so perhaps the following might be of use. I hope so. This was almost too straight-forward! I expected it to be "plug and play" but no instructions came up on the screen when I did so. After some time I discovered that it was detected by my (Windows11) PC, under "This PC", but I was at a loss how to make it "work". Eventually, after referring to Chat GPT, I discovered that you simply "drag and drop" any files/documents/pictures onto it. When I became more confident I dragged and dropped my entire "My Documents", onto it, which it swallowed up in a very few minutes. I was relieved to find that they were indeed copied onto the device, and not transferred onto it; my Documents remained on my PC. I am now wondering how it "knows" when I have made a small amendment to a single document next time I do a backup, or whether it will copy my entire Documents all over again, which seems a terrible waste of effort. Finally, I wondered whether there was a minor fault because it had a memory available of 1.81TB all through my experimenting with it, but then, having swallowed pretty much my entire life's work, it now says 1.80 TB. In other words, all my documents, files, pictures and videos have taken up one 181st of its available memory. I could probably have made do with the 1TB version! In summary, a good device but we older customers would appreciate a modicum of basic instruction.

Really good. Liked it so much, I bought a second unit.