WD 18TB Elements Desktop External Hard Drive - USB 3.0, Black

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.

Western Digital make great quality external hard drives and I have never had any issues with any of them...so far! touch wood I would always recommend getting a smaller size hard drive (4tb max size) if possible as they can fail and losing so much data (6tb+) can be difficult to take. I've also read that larger size hard drives are more likely to fail but cannot confirm this. These devices are incredibly easy to setup and use. Just plug in the USB cable and you're away. Note: I would highly recommend using a 3.0 usb slot when transferring large files. USB 3.0 does downgrade to USB 2.0 slots but the speeds are so much slower. If you dont have a usb 3.0 lot then use the 2.0 slot but if your desktop pc has multiple drives then make sure you use the faster 3.0 slot. As mentioned before, I can't fault these drives so far. My only concern is the varying write speeds. A few of the hard drives I have purchased seem to have much faster write speeds than others despite being the same model. I do not know why this is but others have mentioned possible cost cutting and use of slower drives/materials. It can be frustrating but isn't too bad on the whole, it just means waiting a few minutes more. Lastly, PLEASE DO NOT leave your hard drive on all the time! The heat generated will impact the drive and can lead to problems. These drives shouldn't be left unused for a long time but should NOT be used constantly as a seperate drive. They are for storage/backup of larger files to decrease file space on your pc/laptop. If you feel like the hard drive is getting hot or been on for a long time, then please safely eject the device and allow it to cool down. Overall I'm very happy with my purchase. Delivery was very fast and Amazon were much cheaper than any where else. I will definitely be buying another one in the future and hope Western Digital continue making high quality but affordable products like this.

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!

A competitively priced external hard drive that's ideal for backing up one's data and photos.

I bought 2x 14TB HDD for £190 on Amazon Prime Day sale as a upgrade to my home server (and backup server) storage. Each machine was running a 8TB Toshiba, 4TB WD and 4TB Seagate. Intention is to eventually replace one of the 4TBs from each machine. But for now, they are running plugged into the USB ports. The drives arrived safely boxed and plugging in and switching on was very easy, with no drivers required. I reformatted them and copied the data from one the 4TB drives over. This was particularly painful and took about 2 days over the USB interface, achieving around 36MByte/s when I was checking which wasn't really USB 3.0 speed but more USB 2 speed. Though this could be down to my ageing servers rather than the drives. The drives themselves ran with relatively little noise, I'd say there were quieter in the enclosure than my Toshiba 8TB drives were inside my PC cases! The drives themselves did get quite warm, but not hot, certainly less warm than the Toshibas (though those did run hot) Once these bed in for a few more days and I've copied my data across, I will test my next plan and update the review accordingly... Update 20 Oct 2020: Having opened up the case, the drives are 14TB WD140EMFZ drives. I've "shucked" the drives out and attached them directly to the SATA connectors on my PCs. This has then yielded the full potential of the performance of these drives. I've sequential read of around 190MByte/s transfer speeds now which is pretty damn good considering it's in a 5 year old PC. Perfectly adequate for a PC storage drive or NAS drive. Random Read/Write is pretty bad, but in this age, spinning disks really are not the solution for such operations and I suggest you get yourself a cheap SSD for that sort of usage. Update 17 Nov 2020: These drives have been running flawlessly for a month now. My backup server had a PSU failure and upon replacing PSU, the drive (and others) carried on working falwlessly. To answer a comment. These drives when shucked out are exactly the same as form factor and data and power connectivity as any standard SATA internal 3.5" drive. screw holes etc are all in standard places. Update 23 Apr 2021: These drives have now been running for 6 months. I've upgrade my backup server and now both machines are running 24/7. Both 14TB drives still seem fine with currently no indications of any issues. Hopefully, touch wood this will keep going this way for a long time...

Had it for 2 months now and is 2/3 full with backup of videos, movies and photos. I don't find it noisy. Speed is ok for me. What i do like is that if you are watching a movie you can pause for ages and it will contine the film without hesitation. If i do that on my toshiba ext HD it 'glitches' the image on the screen for a few seconds while it sorts itself out. The only negative is if connected but not in use it takes seconds to spin up from idle when sent a command. Would recommend.

So far, so good! Pre-formatted in NTFS, which if you want for videos and connecting to your TV is the format you want. It allows the TV to write thumbnails to the disk so doesn’t have to load them every time. Also it allows you to delete videos from the TV. Not noisy, and fast to load and transfer files onto. I transferred 10 tb of videos and it took around 6 hours which I think is OK. It does go idle sometimes when connected to PC but does not do this with the tv, it responds well. Slight delay loading very large video files (>50gb) but it does load them unlike some other HDs. Very good product and happy with purchase!

WD 8TB Elements Desktop External Hard Drive - USB 3.0 Excellently priced for 8TB of storage. Curry’s had it at £10 more and wanted to charge delivery. Delivered next day free of charge from Amazon which was good. As this is a Western Digital drive the manufacturer has a 3-year warranty. I own lots of WD drives (I even have a 2TB home cloud for years now) and I have NEVER had a single failure. I am using the drive as external storage and I am already up to over 7TB. As it’s USB 3.0, it is very fast at both read and write. The supplied USB 3.0 cable is about 1m which is quite good. Allows me to sit the drive on my desk with the computer under the desk. A few negatives but only tiny things: It stands upright and doesn’t take much to tip it over, twice I have knocked my knee on the desk and the drive has fallen over whilst it was in use. It could do with some sort of stand for the base to prevent this. I would not call it a portable drive, it requires a power adapter (supplied with it), and its not one of those 2.5inch drives, it is quite chunky. Regarding the button on the rear, its not clear what it is ‘supposed’ to do. While the drive is running, holding the button for 5 seconds will shut the drive down. If the drive is in standby (not shut down) it will wake it up. If a short press when it is running, it will go to standby and then sometimes immediately wake again! When in standby, it can take a while to run up to speed, specially annoying when booting my computer in the morning as the computers BIOS detects the drive but then has to wait for it to spin up and ‘come online’ before my computer continues to boot. Although this may only be a matter of 10 or 15 seconds, it doubles my computer boot time which is normally only 10 seconds! If I remember to shut the drive down at night, then this is not a problem, but who does that! It churns away on its own, it has a constant ‘duh-du’ sound about every 5 seconds with the odd ‘duh-du-du’. As it’s sat on my desk it just sounds like someone drumming their fingers on the desk. It’s very quiet but noticeable, I’m constantly wondering what it’s doing! Overall, excellent value for money, well respected manufacturer, excellent speed and capacity.