This review is about the SINGLE DRIVE 8TB version of the WD MyBook. Green & white cardboard box, black plastic drive case. No Encryption. Go ahead & buy it, it is ok. :-)
SPEED: The drive is faster than I expected. It took about 1 day to copy 5.14 TB to it via USB 3. Those were mostly music files 3MB to 60mb plus some videos. I did not time it or watch it closely. You can easily play movies or music from this drive without skipping.
HEAT: the drive did NOT get hot. Not even very warm while chugging away for almost a whole day relentlessly copying over 5 TB of data. The drive has vents on the 2 ends. You are supposed to put the vent side up, so the heat can exit. That means the drive will be standing on end, which is probably not how you were going to place it. There are rubber feet on the other end. I suspect that the people who said this drive runs hot did not stand the drive up as intended. You can not stack these drives, but you could stand several next to each other.
ENCRYPTION: There is NONE. That is GREAT news. I had heard that the drive was married to the case by hardware encryption. Without getting in to the reasons why that is a terrible idea, I'll just say that we don't have to talk about encryption here, because there is isn't any and that is fine. Before doing anything else, we reformatted as HFS+ for Mac, then copied over 5 TB of data.
I can tell you that if you remove the drive from the plastic case and pop it into a SATA "toaster" or other external sata case it works. The data is still there and useful. Yay! There are a lot of reviews saying that the drive will not work if removed from the case (unless reformatted), but I'm telling you it does work & all data is preserved. Maybe they did not reformat before starting a or maybe they have the dual-drive raid version. This means that if the case ever fails, you CAN put the drive into a different case & run with it as is. Great news!
NOISE: there is some vibration when the drive is running. A very low hum. It may or may not bother you There is no fan. The case has rubber mounts & rubber feet which help dampen the vibration. There is some minor vibration while running in the factory case, and also when running in a NewerTech "toaster". Neither vibrations are objectionable unless maybe you are in a recording studio.
CONNECTOR: USB 3 micro B. Just one.
POWER ADAPTER: is rated at 12v dc 1.5 A. Does not block multiple outlets in use, but it does protrude to the side. There may be a ferrite bead around the cord, near the end.
WHATS INSIDE THE PACKAGE: The drive, a warranty statement, USB to USB 3 micro b cable and power cable. Some packaging and a Need Help? card directing you to support.wd.com/contact No software is included, unless it was on the drive, which came formatted as ExFAT, but we reformatted it to HFS+ which is normal for Mac.
NO ACTIVITY LIGHT: I can hardly believe WD cheaped out by not providing an activity light. Weird, I wish it had one, but for the price/performance I'm not going to change my rating.
NO POWER SWITCH. No big deal. There is a wall-wart which isn't that bad. Does not hog more than 1 power outlet.
WHAT"S INSIDE the case: a single 8 TB WD drive (128MB cache) and a small triangular SATA to USB 3 board. (opening the plastic case is tricky! See how to on youtube & make sure you are looking at late 2016 or after. the case tabs are U shaped, pointing back at you. Very unusual & you are certain to break some tabs off. There are 3 tabs on one side, and 2 tabs on the other side of the same end. The feet end does not have actual tabs. Several credit cards, then Torx 10 and Phillips 2). Drive has a large white sticker. Model WD80EZZX. Rated at 5V 440mA, 12V 550mA DC. No jumper pins and no place for them. The bare drive feels pretty heavy compared to lower capacity drives. No software was included unless it was on the disk, which we ignored and reformatted for Mac.
All in all, I'm happy with this drive so far. At current price it is a real value and seems faster than a 'back up drive'. I'll update this review if my opinion changes, but this 8TB single drive is a Buy.
Inside is WD80EZZX. 5400rpm Helium drive. From my performance benchmarks it looks like a PMR drive rather than SMR one (e.g. Seagate).
Purchased this external hard drive to expand storage capabilities on an Xbox One. Plugged the drive in to one of the three Xbox USB 3.0 ports, followed the prompt to format the drive to store game data, and was ready to go. It was easy to move existing game data from the internal drive to the external drive. Note: You will need space on your power strip or electrical outlet to plug in the power adapter.
If you are using this drive with the Xbox One and use a lot of accessories that also need USB ports, you may want to buy a 4-port USB hub. I wasn't thinking about that when I bought this and had to pick one up later.
I did an extensive review of external hard drives online, trying to find one that had universally good reviews. All of the big name ones I found (WD, Seagate) had 15-18% of the reviews rated as a 1 (lowest possible). These negative reviews usually cited two problems: 1. The product did not work out of the box. 2. The product failed after many months. How could there not be an external HD that has virtually no negative reviews? Maybe it is impossible to produce 1000's of HDs without a certain percentage failing. I don't know. I had used WD drives for many years with never any problem, so I took a chance and ordered My Book. I got 8TB, even though I will never need that much. The reason for getting a new HD is that my previous HD had only 1TB, which I eventually used. (I am a photographer shooting in RAW.)
I found that My Book connected only to the USB 3.0 port on my laptop. It did not connect to my USB 2.0 hub. It did not connect to my Synology NAS (although my 1TB WD Passport connects find to Synology.) Once connected, it showed up as a drive on my Win 7 computer.
I use it only for backup. Each night I backup my laptop, my wife's PC, and some drives on the NAS, for a total of about 1.04TB. My Book works fine. Now I will just have to wait and see if it fails. In my case, failure would not be catastrophic because it is just a backup. I could toss the entire My Book and buy another external HD if I need to.
Macintosh owners with High Sierra, you may find yourself frustrated with an "operation failed" error in Disk Utility when you attempt to reformat for Mac. Search the WD Support area for "macOS Disk Utility Error Media Kit Reports Not Enough Space..." which is answer ID 20789. The fix is easy. However, fixes offered elsewhere on the internet are downright byzantine. Stick with the WD support file. (PS: WD notes the error may also occur for Sierra and El Capitan.)
Feature Product
- Auto backup with included WD Backup software and Time Machine compatibility
- Password protection with hardware encryption. Trusted storage built with WD reliability
- Formatted exFAT for out-of-the-box compatibility with Windows and Mac. Operating System- Windows 10, Windows 8.1 or Windows 7 operating systems. macOS High Sierra, Sierra (10.12), El Capitan (10.11) operating systems (reformatting required). Note- Compatibility may vary depending on user's hardware configuration and operating systems and requires reformatting for Time Machine
- USB 3.0 port; USB 2.0 compatible
- 3-year manufacturer's limited warranty
Description
The My Book drive is trusted desktop storage designed to complement your personal style with a massive amount of space to store your photos, videos, music and documents. Equipped with password protection and perfectly paired with WD Backup or Apple Time Machine, My Book desktop storage helps keep your files safe.
I would've given this 5 stars, but because it took me a bit to figure out how to use the utility for this, I had to take away for that. It will burn itself out if you don't use the tool to shut it down after 15-30 minutes of inactivity. It wasn't intuitive how to get to that part of WD Discovery, and I'm a computer expert. If I can't figure it out in 5 seconds, then the utility is not user-friendly. I ejected the device to cool it down, and had to unplug everything (USB & Power), reboot my computer, and plug the device back in. That's a pretty clumsy way to get the device recognized by my computer again. For the price, it's okay. I might need another one, but have no more USB ports available. The Ethernet choices are far more expensive, so yuck on that.
I have two other My Book units, both 4TB. One was getting dangerously close to filling up so I decided to update it with this 8TB unit. Plugged it in and my Window 7 recognized it immediately. No problem. Spent almost two days copying everything over from the 4TB unit. I got a warning from Windows the new 8TB unit was almost full. How could an 8TB unit get as full as a 4TB unit by copying the files? Well, turns out the 8TB unit was formatted with exFAT, not NTFS. Also, when I rebooted my PC, it failed to boot at all. Unplugged 8TB drive and it booted fine - plugged in back in and my files were there - albeit the drive was still showing as almost full. I checked one folder on the 4TB source against the 8TB destination and both contained the same number of files and were the same size - 305GB. But the size on the disk itself jumped from 305GB on the 4TB drive to 863 GB on the 8TB drive. Finally decided to reformat the 8TB unit to NTFS since (1) I gained no additional storage space and (2) my PC would not boot with the 8TB drive attached. So now I'll spend another day recopying almost 3.8TB of data - again. If you are in a Windows-only environment (i.e., no Macs to share data with), reformat your new drive to NTFS before using.
As a digital artist and Maya animator, and a huge movie aficionado, and a photographer, I'm constantly butting my head against storage ceilings.
This is the best bang for the buck you're going to find.
Take it from someone who had terabytes when people still thought gigs were a lot: You can never be too thin, too rich, or have enough disk space.
My 3TB model has been reliable for years, the 1TB from the same family has powered my Stora NAS for most of a decade now. The 8TB is excellent headroom and is literally best bang for the buck, in that it's the sweet spot of dollars per terabyte. Do the math: bigger ones and smaller ones are both more expensive in $/TB.
Recommended.
This is a decent unit. It does its job, but I don't like that it has a noise it makes while it's idling. I have it hooked up to my Xbox and sometimes even if the Xbox is off, I'll be trying to have breakfast and watch TV and I just hear it cranking. It's not loud, but loud enough to be annoying.
I'm sure in like a year the 8TB hard drives will be using some new hardware that doesn't have this problem, so maybe wait for that if noise is a concern or go down to the 4TB. I have the 4TB MyBook and it does not produce any noise.
It was pretty much plug&play, with the exception if the formatting. Computer recognized it immediately, but my Acronis recovery disk would not, so it was impossible to recover backups. Once I determined that the bloody thing came formatted as xFat instead of NTFS, and got it formatted correctly, it works perfectly. Would give five stars if it had an "activity" light so one could tell when it was on, and/or working, and it came properly formatted.
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