WD 20TB Elements External Hard Drive, Desktop HDD storage, USB 3.0 compatible, Fast Transfer rates, Plug-and-play storage for all your pictures, videos, music and documents, Black

Big & Fast
It was less than 2 years ago that I purchased an 8Tb Seagate Backup hub Plus external drive – what I thought then was a “big” drive, but found I had filled that up all too soon. I use this drive to backup my NAS, which stores all my media, so as this slowly grew in size, I needed to get myself a higher capacity drive.
Enter the Western Digital 14Tb Elements drive, which at £249 at the time of writing, represents pretty decent value considering I paid £179 for the aforementioned 8Tb Seagate model a couple of years back. Strangely, if I want to buy the equivalent drive as a bare unit i.e not housed in an external enclosure with all the additional electronics that entails, it would actually cost me over £300! Why a less expensive to produce version should cost more than one in an enclosure is beyond me.
The WD unit is rather like a heavy book, in that one edge is curved, rather reminding me of the spine of a hard back. On this surface you will find the single power/activity LED, which is quite small. The drive has small rubber feet such that it stands in a vertical orientation – like a book in a book case. This is perhaps the best orientation for air flow given the vented top and rear edges. I personally don’t really like drives standing up like this, it’s too vulnerable to being knocked if its stood on a busy desk. Lying flat is OK, but I think my unit ran a little hotter like that. I don’t know why WD do not provide an optional to fit stand with wider feet to provide better stability. Such a simple plastic stand would cost next to nothing to produce and would give customers the option to have a more secure base.
That minor gripe aside, the drive itself is impressive in its performance. Unlike the Seagate which was an SMR type drive and thus termed an “archive” drive that suffered from slow write performance at just 38.7 Mb/sec sequential writes according to my Crystal Disk Mark test, the WD Elements 14Tb drive tested at an impressive 214Mb/sec read and write sequential transfer rate. For reference, the Seagate tested at around 118Mb/sec sequential read as I recall.
As with these large capacity drives, the head seek action is quite heavy, far heavier than my internal 2Tb drives and will feel like the drive is suffering from a fit of the shakes when initializing after a power on. Not an issue, but worthy of note to those who may think they have received a faulty unit. The previously mentioned 8Tb Seagate had a heavy seek action too, but not as heavy as this monster from WD, I can only imagine it may have to do with the high platter count such high capacity hard drives have.
These external drives actually appear to run warmer than internal drives, so it’s advisable to situate the drive somewhere where it is not penned in by other items. The drive performed flawlessly when I backed up my entire NAS to it over my horribly slow USB 2 connection on the NAS (only one I have) and took some 81.5 hours to complete the transfer of some 7.3Tb of data. So, it is certainly able to operate continuously for that length of time without issue. Of course, had I backed up via a USB 3 connection, then the transfer would’ve been far faster.
I suggest that purchasers of this drive, as with all Western Digital drives, register them on the WD website in order to ensure the full warranty cover.
The drive comes complete with the required power and USB cables of generous lengths. The drive has no power switch as such, so once connected to power and an active USB port, will power up. This drive seems to be smart enough to power down/enter standby if the connected computer is shut down or goes to sleep.
Connected to a Windows 10 PC, the drive reports 12.7Tb available. Of course, 12.7Tb is what I call “proper” Terra bytes despite hard drive manufacturers deeming a Tb to be an even 1,000Gb where as I, being old school, see a Tb as 1,024Gb hence the 12.7Tb shown in Windows. That’s fine, not a WD thing as all manufacturers go with this system of measurement. The drive’s default volume label is “Elements”, but of course you can change this if you so wish. Nothing required to do if using with a Windows based computer, so you can immediately start copying files to it once connected as the drive is pre formatted using NTFS. Mac users will either need to reformat or use a utility to permit use of NTFS file systems. No backup software is supplied with this drive, unlike the My Book series from WD. however, this is a bonus as I generally prefer not to use the software provided by the manufacturer for this purpose anyway. A quick note to those less computer savvy; There are numerous free backup programs for Windows you can use if you need backup software.
This Western Digital 14Tb Elements is an impressive drive at an impressive price.

A little noisey, a tad slow but plenty of space and opportunity!
The 18TB drive is absolutely fantastically priced for its size!
The drive is a little noisey as it awakens from its slumber, it’s also a relatively slow drive and doesn’t try to hide that.
However it’s space and value far exceed the perceived downsides of the speed and noise of the drive as you won’t be using this daily of you are using it in its USB form factor.
However when you crack it open, that’s when this drive really comes alive. Inside the slow plastic USB shell lies a 7200rpm WDC WD180EDGZ which when connected directly to an array or PC is silent and really rather impressive performance.
If used as a USB drive Its sheer size alone will allow you and the entire family to back up all of your important data such as photos, videos documents safely in one east to access place.
If you are cracking this open and putting inside a sinology, raid array or simply a PC the 7200rpm WDC WD180EDGZ really does hold its own against smaller drives, theoretically faster drives.
Overall this is a reliable, great value drive that is designed for backup and storage (not for high speed gaming or searching) and If you understand that going in you won’t be disappointed!
These are also the same drives that the extremely handsome “Richard” form Digital Foundry purchased and recommended during the Black Friday sales (2021) and we all know that recommendations don’t come much higher or more prestigious than that.
A fantastic purchase!

He comprado este disco porque necesitaba renovar mi antiguo disco de copias de seguridad para el iMac. Además quería uno de gran capacidad, para utilizarlo de paso para los PC’s que tengo en casa. Como ya tengo varios discos WD y todos me han salido perfectos, me decanté por éste, ya que el precio era bastante económico para los 3Tb de que dispone. Además, es más pequeño de lo que parece en las fotos. Basta con que miréis las medidas y peso y compararlo con algo similar para daros cuenta.
Una cosa importante, es que a la hora de formatearlo debe escogerse la Tabla de Particiones GUID (GPT), ya que el formato MBR (que es el más habitual a la hora de formatear) no es compatible con unidades de más de 2 Teras. Si no seleccionáis esta opción, os marcará un error antes de iniciar el formateo del disco (al menos en mac así lo hace). Comento esto porque es muy habitual con este tipo de discos, que la gente piense que el disco está defectuoso por no poder formatearlo.
En mi caso he creado dos particiones (una para TimeMachine del iMac) y otra en formato ExFat, que es compatible para archivos de más de 4 Gb. tanto en Mac (que para mi desgracia, sigue sin soportar de forma nativa la escritura en NTFS) como en PC.
En cuanto a la velocidad del disco, es muy buena tanto en USB 3.0 como en USB 2.0. Tiene muy pocos picos en la gráfica de velocidad, y se mantiene constante en todo momento (excepto cuando se copian miles de archivos pequeños, como fotos por ejemplo) donde éste y todos los discos bajan y mucho la velocidad de copiado.
En resumen, gran compra y gran espacio de almacenamiento espero que para muchos años.
Edito mi opinión (unos meses más tarde) para comentar que es posible apagar el disco totalmente, ya sea con el PC encendido o apagado. Para ello, expulsamos el disco desde Windows o Mac y si este no se apaga automáticamente, DEJAMOS PULSADO el botón power del disco durante 3 segundos. Veremos que el led deja de parpadear y oiremos como el disco se ha detenido. (Comento esto porque he visto en varios comentarios que había gente que no conseguía apagar el disco)

Es el quinto disco de este modelo que compro, los primeros eran de 1TB y los dos últimos de 2TB.
Básicamente los uso para almacenar películas y están conectados a un reproductor multimedia que a su vez va conectado al televisor. Aunque los empleo con USB 2.0 (son USB 3.0) la velocidad de acceso es buena, son silenciosos y por ahora no he tenido ni un solo problema de pérdida de datos o lecturas erróneas. Este modelo lleva un pequeño LED blanco frontal que indica cuando se accede al disco. Es mejor que los modelos anteriores que llevaban dos LEDs azules rectangulares de gran tamaño que daban demasiada luz cuando estabas viendo una película con las luces del comedor apagadas.
Lleva un interruptor trasero de parada/puesta en marcha que puede ser útil en según que casos..