Pros: Fast performance, USB powered, compact size

Cons: It doesn't have unlimited storage capability :P

Other Thoughts: This is the second of these that I've acquired. First one I have plugged into a router and use as a network shared drive 24/7. It's been active since January 2015 and has only gone inactive when the power goes out. WD hard drives, both internal and external, have been the most reliable of all the drives I've ever owned. Knock on wood, I've not had one fail before it became obsolete.

Pros: Great hard drive. Looks good too. Works great on almost every system I connect it to. Read on...

Cons: This drive WILL NOT work on a new iMac (bought Nov. 2015) running El Capitan. I spent over an hour with Apple support and we were not able to get this drive to mount. It does not show up in Disk Utility or System Information. Apple's newest firmware simply does not support all USB3 devices.

Other Thoughts: I also have an late-2013 iMac running El Capitan and the drive works fine on that platform.

Pros: This is a 2.5" external hard drive from Western Digital, arguably the best hard drive manufacturer there is. This drive supports a very high level of encryption so if you're storing sensitive data where security is a big concern this is what you want to look for.

If security isn't a realistic concern for you, or you know you won't want to enter a password every time you want to access your device, then you can get similar drives without the encryption and save yourself some money.

It's small, looks modern and is easy to use. WD includes free software and diagnostic tools for their drives which can be very helpful.

3 year warranty, much longer than most external hard drives.

Cons: In order to make the enclosure as small as possible they remove the standard I/O board from the hard drive. What this means is, basically, that you can't take the hard drive out of it's case and put it in a computer. Now, it's an external drive so that's fine, right? Wrong. If anything happens to the drive, if it fails in any way you won't be able to recover the data off the drive. If the USB port gets damaged in any way, you won't be able to access the information on the drive. Could be from falling
or something as simple as accidentally leaning on the USB cable damaging the pins.

When external hard drives fail what you do to recover the data is remove it from the case and connect it to a computer with a SATA to USB adapter and then run your
recovery suite. This is also how you recover data from an external drive with broken USB port. This lack of ability to troubleshoot is a big problem and a deal breaker for me.
It's an external hard drive, it's primary purpose is to BACKUP data. If the backup isn't reliable then it's useless. If it can't be recovered in a failure then it isn't reliable.

In fairness, as long as the USB port is undamaged you can still attempt to recover data from a failed drive. However recovery of data from a crashed hard drive is an inconsistent procedure, it's less reliable over USB than it is over SATA. Those internal headers are really important!

Let me be very clear, if anything happens to that USB port EVERYTHING on that drive is gone forever. That is an unacceptable risk.

Other Thoughts: Performance of this drive isn't spectacular but it isn't bad either, it's exactly average.

My average read speeds were 78MB/s. Average write speeds were 62MB/s transferring 138GB consisting of every file type imaginable.

There are faster drives out there.

Seagate still makes external drives with the internal headers intact, so I strongly recommend looking at their product offerings.

I want to give this drive 1 star because of the removal of internal headers, but the likelihood of one of these "catastrophic failures" is low enough that doesn't seem fair.

I'm giving it 3 stars because this drive is incredibly average. The company, support and software is spectacular, which would make it 5 stars. But then the lack of internal headers brings us back down to 3 stars, wiping out the advantage WD brings just by being WD.

Pros: +Compact - This is barely larger than a 2.5" laptop hard drive, which I suspect is what is housed within.

+Extremely Easy to Use - Just plug it in and you're ready to go. If you choose to install the associated software it is located on the drive itself and is easily installed from there, albeit entirely optional if you just want to store files on it. The software is also very simple to setup and use.

+Responsive USB 3.0 Interface - My PC's recognize this drive very quickly and file transfers initialize instantly. Overall performance is still limited by the mechanical nature of the drive, but it is otherwise very responsive.

+Storage Size - For the price and physical dimensions of the device it's amazing how much storage capacity it has.

+Sleek, Simple Appearance - The top is gloss white with a matte white/gray placard. The sides and bottom both have a light gray matte finish, the sides being slightly less matte than the bottom. There is a tiny white LED that shares a side with the USB port and blinks to indicate drive activity. Personally, I would prefer the LED to be on the opposite side, as the 'port' side naturally points away from me.

+Vibration Reduction Feet - 4 rubber feat should keep vibration from transferring to/from the drive. The feet also do a good job of keeping the drive from sliding around on slick surfaces.

+Quiet - Only with my ear pressed up against it was I able to hear a slight hum as data was being transferred.

+Western Digital - I have more experience with Western Digital than probably any other computer component manufacturer. My first hard drive was a 3.5GB WD back in the mid 90's, and in total I have owned 19 WD drives over the years. I have only experienced premature problems with 2 of them and WD's warranty process was one of the simplest and most painless I have experienced.

Cons: -Speed Bound by Mechanical Drive - In the first moments of a file transfer you will see the potential speed of the USB 3.0 interface. I saw transfer rates over 300MB/s for the first second or so. This, of course, is information being transferred over the USB 3.0 interface (fast) and between buffers (very fast, volatile type memory, like RAM). As soon as the data reaches the mechanical drive mechanisms (slow) you will be bound by the mechanical drive performance. Most of my file transfers averaged around 35MB/s, which is about what I would expect from an average 2.5" mechanical laptop drive. This is normal and should be expected from this type of drive, but it should be pointed out that the USB 3.0 branding is not an indication of overall performance, although it does help and successfully removes the bottleneck that would be USB 2.0.

-Tiny USB cable - Measuring roughly 18 inches long, the cable is just long enough to plug the drive in under normal circumstances. This might actually be preferable for use as a travel drive to not have a long tangled cable to fuss with on the road. For my home use, however, it would be nice for it to be longer.

Other Thoughts: I transferred a variety of media files to and from the drive (about 100GB total) and experienced very consistent performance. Transfers to and from the drive both averaged almost exactly 35MB/s. Playback of HD Media content on the drive was responsive and I was able to scan, skip chapters, fast forward, etc.. without any noticeable delay.

Between cloud storage, seemingly endless web-mail inbox capacity, USB 'thumb' drives, various NAS solutions, and massive internal PC hard drives, there is simply no shortage of modern data storage options these days. Given all of those options, the role of the trusty external hard drive has not diminished. If you require secure, portable, offline, massive storage, then this is precisely the type of product to fulfill those requirements. Nothing else currently accomplishes those tasks as well as a drive like this one.

I have experienced no issues with this model and would gladly recommend it to anyone who is in the market for an external drive.

Pros: The drive is very small - about the size of a laptop hard drive - which is probably the base component inside.

No unusual heat was produced while copying 100 GB of data to it. It was just slightly warm. Also, it was very quiet. Could not hear anything from it.

The included cord is USB 3.0 compatible, with the micro USB connection that is the same as the Samsung S5 phone that I have. That's a plus, for me.

Cons: Hard drive activity light is on the side with the plug. Might be better if it was on the front.

Nothing else to complain about, really. It would be awesome if it was SSD-based, but certainly fine for a backup or transporting video, music or other large files

Other Thoughts: Not sure how rugged it would be, but I'll definitely be careful with it, since it is a traditional spinning drive and not SSD.


Here are the results from CrystalDiskMark:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 5.0.2 x64 (C) 2007-2015 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes

Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 114.708 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 113.365 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 0.579 MB/s [ 141.4 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 1.400 MB/s [ 341.8 IOPS]
Sequential Read (T= 1) : 113.887 MB/s
Sequential Write (T= 1) : 113.662 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 0.544 MB/s [ 132.8 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 1.390 MB/s [ 339.4 IOPS]

Test : 1024 MiB [K: 0.0% (0.3/1863.0 GiB)] (x3) [Interval=5 sec]
Date : 2015/09/15 10:39:00
OS : Windows 7 Professional SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)

Real life data copy of over 100 GB of music averaged 30MB per second, reading from Samsung 840 Evo SSD. Took around 70 minutes for ~108GB of songs. So not incredibly fast, but still decent for an external drive. Copied 20GB of HD home movies averaged about 58MB per second, which is what I expected for larger files.