WD 22TB Elements External Hard Drive, Desktop HDD storage, USB 3.0 compatible, Fast Transfer rates, Easy add on storage for all your pictures, videos, music and documents, Black

I've bought many of these to use in my NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices. I've had the 18TB, 20TB, 22TB and 24TB versions of this drive bought at various times over the last few years. All have been reliable (the 22TB which I am writing the review on is over a year old and is working fine).Always check the drive works and is free of errors before removing from the device. I've not had any drive dead on arrival but always best to check as your warranty may be voided once you remove from the enclosure. The drives are easy to remove (search online to see how to do it).One thing to be aware of is that larger hard drives are more noisy generally. In general operation, the noise is not too bad but you may find in an array there's a bit of noise when they all start up together.It's a bit of a shame that manufacturers put a premium on standalone hard drives as it's not great for the environment to buy in enclosures when you know you're going to remove it – even if you recycle the enclosure and the power adaptor. But this is a far cheaper way to get large drives.I would recommend these as a reliable and cheaper alternative to drives marketed as NAS drives. Always do a bit of research first though to see what people recommend at the time of purchase. Reddit is usually a good place to check.

I was transferring 1.5TB of data with this 8TB WD Elements at 200mb/s. Nice and compact, it is much quieter when it is writing at full speed.

A good drive for my use, but Linux users should be aware that the drive does not spin down when not in use. The drive works with LUKS and can be auto-mounted at boot (raspberry pi 4 or 5, headless). The drive is absolutely fine, I believe the issue is with the USB-SATA bridge chip and you will notice WD do not list the drive as compatible with Linux. Although the bridge causes errors with hdparm -y /dev/sd#, it still does spin the drive down and depending on your use case, can be scripted with Cron to spin the drive down at regular intervals. Other spin down options are hd-idle, smartctl etc., but this takes some knowledge of Linux and a bit of trial and error.

I've been using Western Digital (WD) since 2009 starting with a 500gb then a 1tb, 2tb and now a 4tb. They've all performed flawlessly and have even withstood drops to the floor. These contain photos that I've taken at a pro level but I'm finding it frustrating to search across 4 separate drives so my next move will be to consolidate these into a 10tb drive. I work on a Mac and it's just a simple matter of formatting for Mac. They use the same power connector so it's handy not having to re-buy those. More recent drives use the crimped connector at drive end (not sure of technical name) and USB at other end.

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.

I have had 5 x WD Powered Drives in other words, a drive that you need to plug in and it's powered, all have been brilliant they are all used on a daily basis and my oldest drive is from 2011 (14years old!!) all use the same transformer so interchangeable unit to unit if required. This is disk that in my opinion is very reliable. Works with Mac and Windows, I work in Mac and always reformat to Journaled, but the disk comes formatted as FAT3 which would work with either Mac or Windows straight out of the box.