Western Digital 4TB Elements Desktop External Hard Drive, USB 3.0 for plug-and-play storage - Western DigitalBWLG0040HBK-NESN

I've had four dual-drive RAID enclosures for RAID mirroring. I've never had a single drive in these enclosures to fail, but I've had several controller board failures and have ended up cannibalizing the drives for other purposes. I finally discovered (and should have known for years) that macOS can turn any two same-sized drives into a RAID 1 mirror array (or RAID 0, JBOD, or RAID 10). Two single desktop drives are considerably less expensive than buying a dual-drive unit, and if one goes bad they're cheap and easy to replace and rebuild.I bought two of these Elements 4TB desktop drives to make into a RAID 1 array for Time Machine on an iMac. I didn't want the MyBook drives because I didn't want the automatic encryption as a matter of simplicity and reliability. I needed a couple of more USB ports than I had and didn't want to bottleneck my USB 3 hub, so I bought an Anker USB-C to 4 port USB-A 3.0 adapter, since USB-C's bandwidth can absorb in one port anything these 2 drives can produce. Unboxed everything, plugged it in; fired up Disk Utility, formatted each drive for Mac, went to RAID Assistant, chose the drives I wanted, chose RAID 1 and sat back. Time from start to finish: about 15 minutes total, including plug-in time.So far this setup has worked flawlessly. These drives are cool and almost silent. Transfer rates are good, better than with the dual-drive enclosures. The price was excellent, far less than buying a dual-drive enclosure. We'll see how everything behaves over time. They have done Time Machine backups hourly for several years now without issues.Addendum: it's 2024 now, and the dual raid drives have performed flawlessly. I'm about to buy another one to back up my wife's photography and have chosen this drive again because of its reliability.

I found out the hard way, while transferring gigabytes of photographs, that not all hard drives are fast for small files. Some of them slow to a crawl after transferring a few gigabytes of small files -- so much so that with these big drives, it can a very long time -- sometimes even days -- to transfer a bunch of files or back up a computer.Windows and Linux have utilities for measuring file transfer speed, and Mac probably does also. When I checked, I found to my horror that another major brand of 4 TB desktop backup drive that I just bought would start up fast, then slow down to a small fraction of its initial speed. All of my 3 1/2" portable drives and my USB Flash drives did the same! After checking the Internet, I bought this Western Digital 4TB Elements Desktop Hard Drive, WDBWLG0040HBK-NESN.The Western Digital works well, and I'm happy. It's quiet and reliable. Tested with Linux on 10 MiB file size ("small" files) it does slow down, but not excessively, as it proceeds. The average read and write rates are 146 MB/s and 148 MB/s, with a 16.5 msec access time. It's also fine with large files. Other drives I found tested several times slower with small files. I got similar results testing with Windows. For an economical drive like this, the performance is great, and it gets the job done.

I purchased this to use as a local backup for system images of several machines. Although I have an online backup service that regularly updates documents, images and videos, I have found it wise to have an on-site tool for protecting against a hard-drive failure that results in the loss of the operating system and applications. Having just suffered an SSD failure of a drive that was just over a year old, I've decided that a local backup of the entire drive is more useful than a partial backup of data-only using an online service. Using the two together ensures the least painful near-complete recovery, if handled intelligently.I didn't feel the need to use the encrypted WD backup software that's included on some of their other offerings, which is why I bought this one, which was a little less costly. I'm using it with Macrium Reflect to write system images to guard against catastrophic failure & loss of important data/apps.The drive connects easily and quickly to my computers, and can be used on both USB-2 and USB-3 ports. When connected to the USB-3 port of a PC with over 600GB stored on the system drive, I was pleased that a complete system image backup could be written and verified in under 3 hours. This isn't strictly a function of the drive's raw read/write speed, as there is some overhead in Macrium's backup process. I haven't tested the Elements drive for raw read/write speed -- I just know that it seemed pretty speedy for this application, and I was pleased with its performance!I'm hoping to get many years of occasional use from this drive, creating periodic system images to guard against the loss of my O/S & data.

It was exactly what I was looking for. Work good

I got this WD external HDD (4 TB) to replace an aging and possibly failing Fantom Drive (2 TB). Transferring everything over (mostly my music) was quick and easy without problems. This new drive has plenty of room for additional files. Of note is the matter of warranty. It was advertised in several places on the Amazon site that this WD external HDD had a "3" year warranty. Having received my new drive, the box definitely says there is a "2" year warranty and there is paperwork inside making the same claim of a "2" year warranty. I have to admit the 3 year warranty was a selling point for me. Maybe Amazon should look into this matter.