WD Elements 3TB Desktop External Hard Drive

Pros: Great product for a simple backup on a computer.

Cons: It might be a tad slow but other than that I have found no issues.

Pros: Bought a pair on sale to backup my media server with. Took about 28h for each drive to do a full backup of my files (lots of files) and after a solid 28h on each drive, the cases were barely warm to the touch. Despite no air vents they were pretty cool, no noise either. Case is a nice matte black with gloss black sides, and the LED is a nice white/grey light. Sitting next to my Sony PS3, you'd think they were designed for one another given the similar look.

Cons: None yet... will be used once every month for backups so, will have very light use. Hopefully won't encounter any issues. Would be worried if used daily about the heavy plastic ventless case though.

Other Thoughts: Very nice looking, quiet unit. For someone like me who will use it once a month only, it's a great device. Just need to format it when you get it, has some sorta autostart file and a WD logo file on the drive. Using Win7, I formatted it as NFTS with default settings and had no problems.

Pros: not expensive and very large capacity.

Cons: doesn't have usb 3.0

Pros: fast and big. what else do you need?

Cons: none.

Pros: As others have said, this is simply an OEM 3TB Green internal drive stuffed inside a cheap USB 2.0 enclosure. SATA 6Gbps, 64MB cache, the works. It seems silly to waste another $10-30 for the same drive without an enclosure. I imagine the drive is only covered under warranty while inside the enclosure, but it's easy enough to open with a putty knife without breaking any "void if removed" seals (there aren't any), and it's a snap to put back together. Inside you'll find the drive nested in rubber grommets and attached to a small PCB that provides power and USB connectivity. I've tested it both with and without the enclosure and it performs as expected.

Cons: I would have given it 5 eggs if the enclosure was usable but the quality is just too poor. No ventilation, held together by plastic clips, only USB 2.0 with a mini-USB connector at that. It's easy enough to get into for a case that wasn't designed to be opened, but there's no quick and convenient way of swapping drives even if you wanted to.

Other Thoughts: Despite the rather sad enclosure, it's still a terrific deal, especially at $109.99 with a promo code.

Pros: + When opened up using a needle nose tweezer, and finding the clips in the case, what's in the case is a Western Digital desktop sized Caviar Green drive.
- I learned the above when the drive supposedly died on me after less than a year of ownership with my entire design portfolio on it.
+ Not convinced the drive itself was dead, I took a chance and bought a Rosewill 3.5" Sata Enclosure. The actual hard drive was fine, no data was lost.
+ The hard drive inside the case can have a second life inside of a more well cooled Rosewill enclosure, or by being placed into a desktop.
+ I own the 1.5 Tb version of this drive and it's been going strong for almost 3 years in a whole new enclosure.

Cons: - The Western Digital Elements enclosures are terribly made, the cases are a heat trap and eventually overheat the poorly made Sata controller connected to the hard drive.
- 3 other people I know within less than a year have had the same Elements enclosure failure happen, in all but one case I was able to save their data in a new enclosure. The last case of data loss still resulted in a working hard drive though. This is telling as these are good hard drives, placed in heat traps.

Other Thoughts: Due to the large volumes of data these drives store, it's irresponsible to encase them in a non ventilated case like what they come in. The moral, don't assume the drive is dead until you take it out and place it into a new enclosure. 4 eggs are for the drive inside the case and for the price. 0 eggs are for the horrible enclosure they come in.

Pros: The unit is quite and works as expected. I have several USB drives on my system. I just went to the disk management utility and assigned it a drive letter and it came right up with 2.73TB of storage.
I transferred 2 TB of video and copies of my DVD's onto it.
My WD TVlive unit found it without problem and it works great.

Cons: None really.

Other Thoughts: I have read that some people had problems with WD Elements drives on either the front or rear USB port. I have this 3TB unit and a 1.5TB unit and they both work on either front or rear USB port on the WD TVLive unit. I now have my collection of 15 years worth of video on hard drive and connected to the media center.
It's a USB 2.0 unit but that is more than enough speed for a media center.

Pros: Worked great for a year.

Cons: DIED one week after the warranty expired. What a joke. Lost over 2 tb of data while backing it up to my new server. Never buying another external with 1 year warranty ever again. Do yourself a favor and buy a drive with a longer warranty.

Other Thoughts: ONE year warranty---smallest warranty length. Do NOT buy!!

Manufacturer Response:

We appreciate your feedback and apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced with the Elements Desktop 3 TB, as this is not the typical experience with the product.
We are very sorry to hear that your drive malfunctioned just after the warranty period. We would like to assure you that what you have experienced is extremely abnormal.
We would appreciate the opportunity to further assist you, and resolve any further concerns you may have with the device and/or your experience, while providing warranty replacement for you directly. You may contact us at 1 (800) 275-4932, or via our support website at: http://support.wdc.com/rs/. Please indicate within the online case creation or with the first support agent you speak with, that you are responding to a Newegg review, so we route you and your information to the correct team members.

Pros: Huge storage size, the USB 3.0 worked well. Using to create backup image of computers at church then the drive is being taken off site.

Cons: Format this drive immediately!! Do a Google search on how to format this drive and then do it. Ships compatible with XP only, needs to be changed if you are running a Windows 7 machine like all my machines are. Took a bit of time wish it shipped compatible with 7 already

Pros: Setup took all of 5 seconds, Windows immediately recognized the drive and was transferring files in no time. And, come on, it's 3TB. It's going to take some time to fill this one up.

Cons: It uses USB 2.0 instead of the new 3.0, but, since I'm using this drive to store all my multimedia files, it's not really a concern.