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

I will give it only four stars at this time. The loss of a star is due to a missing 370 GB of space. It was purchased as a 4 TB drive, yet at startup only has 3.73 TB. That only looks good presented as a percentage; 92.5%. Yet, in actual data, it s 370 GB... quite a large sum.I just updated the stars. I Googled the problem and found this answer. The math comes out exact. I have found the missing bites."WD Elements external hard drives often appear smaller in capacity than advertised because manufacturers use different units of measurement for storage capacity. While the manufacturer might use a decimal system (1 GB = 1 billion bytes), operating systems like Windows and older Macs use a binary system (1 GB = 1.07 billion bytes). This difference in calculation leads to the discrepancy. "

I just wanted to report my experience for a very specific use case: using this for Frigate NVR recordings.I have a Frigate NVR VM running in ProxMox (i3-14100). Plugged the drive in (went for a USB-C cable), and used USB pass-through. Formatted the main partition with ext4, and mounted at the storage/recordings directory. Moving the old recordings over (was on NVMe) at around 95MB/s. During normal operation, with 15 cameras recording, I see about 5MB/s being written to the USB drive.Overall, very happy with this setup. I didn't have any spare SATA ports, 4 used for a RAID-5 array (as my main NAS server) and I didn't want the recordings constantly spinning up that array - so I decided on a USB powered external drive just for recordings. I also have an NVMe drive for the VM storage, which was working fine, but I also had a slight concern regarding TBW (I have almost 20 cameras all recording). If there are issues with bandwidth, I'll post a follow-up.

Very happy with my purchase, having a 1TB SSD main and this as my side piece external gives me all the space I need. Playing games on it the loading speeds are slightly slower on this HDD than the SSD but not by much. Other than that the gameplay performance is the same no matter which drive I'm using which are ultra settings everything in any game on my decent laptop (16GB DDR5 RAM, Nvidia Geforce 4060 graphics card). So any games that require a lot of loading and are newer I'll put on the SSD and everything else goes on this. Thank you, it is a great product.

What can you expect from WD? Pure quality. They built this thing like a tank. I dropped it 2 times and I though that's it. However it still works really well. I only buy drives from WD because they are very reliable.

Bought two.Very strong points: Both are going strong, making full and differential backups, for six years, on two computers.Since I've had mixed luck with automatic-backup software, I have to spend more time than I want keeping everything backed up, but these really great. These have been far more reliable than most external hard drives in the past.Minor Downside: Since they are high-speed spinning disks, handle them with great care when they are running or spinning down. To turn just the external hard drive off when not in use for a day or more: first you must software-eject the drive using Windows Explorer, then unplug the power plug because these don't have an on/off switch. Don't move it for about 5 minutes until it has stopped and is perfectly quiet and no vibration.

I am a WD fan from way back. I have two Home PC's and a WD Elements attachedto each machine; and they are very compatible with each PC. They are reliable, butnot very portable; home use only. The connectivity is wonderful; plug and play witheach unit pre-formatted. For security, there is a small on-off switch on the rear panel.These WD's are not meant to be dropped or banged around, but as a desktop device,the will give many years of good service.

What’s funny is I got this from a suggestion from an AI app. I started recording music on my laptop and using a DAW with a ton of plugins and loops and everything else you can get……well talk about saying goodbye to EVERY byte of storage you have on your measly laptop. So I was looking for the best solution to my storage issues and after narrowing down my needs, decided on this! Super nice quality, easy to use - just plug it in and you’re ready to rock! I went with the 2T capacity and that’s more than enough for everything I need to do! Great capacity for all my projects and add-ons. The design is nice and sleek, super fast for what I am doing. I was thinking about getting a 2nd one for gaming! Great product!

I put a whole lot of movies on this thing just in case of Armageddon and series of shows and things like that but it's way better for pictures and everything for terabytes is a whole lot