Question 1

What is the disk capacity for this "5TB" drive? All of the specs say its "up to 3TB"

Accepted Answer

5,000,946,249,728 bytes, or 4.54 TB.  Seems a little dishonest to me, to market a 4.54 TB drive as a 5 TB drive, but this seems to have been the industry-standard sleight-of-hand way of marketing that these companies have used for years, back to the days when hard drives were measured in MB.  A little (very little) of this capacity is tied up with the usual disc drive operation software.

Question 2

What's the rpm speed 5400 or 7200rpm?
What's the cache size 32/64/128mb?
Will the hard drive always remain detected by windows 8/8.1/10 or will it be not be detectable during sleep mode?
Can I use another backup software other than WD backup such as macrium reflect in order to generate daily scheduled image or cloned backups or will the drive simply become not detectable if not in use?
Any response will be greatly appreciated, thank you.

Accepted Answer

I dont remember about cache. Only i can say - there are no problems whit perfomance in write/read operations when i work with RAW photos and large archives.
Hard drive works normally after sleep or hybernate. No problems with that, you didnt need to reattach it.
You can use any software with this drive.

Question 3

I need to know the ac adapter specs as I can't recall which of my adapters it uses and I don't want to break it using the wrong adapter.  Does anyone know the complete specs for the ac adapter?

Accepted Answer

First, it comes with its own adapter, so you use the one that comes in the package with the HD.
The adapter that came with mine was made by Ktec, Model KSAS0241200150HU, input 120V AC (non-polarized AC plug), output 12V DC, 1.5A, medium sized barrel plug, tip positive (barrel negative).

Question 4

I want to copy over 4 tb of data files to this drive using a windows 7 computer so I can then use the data files on a windows xp computer.  Will the XP recognize and mount this drive?

Accepted Answer

Yes, the drive is USB 3, which is inherently cross-compatible with USB 2 which Windows XP supports out of the box.  There is nothing additional you'd need for this setup to work.

Question 5

Can this be partitioned to create 2 2.5TB drives as mirrored drives for redundency?

Accepted Answer

Yes, it can be partitioned and used as such, it's still a standard hard drive.  However it should be noted that this kind of redundancy does NOT insure against hardware failure.  If the drive itself fails, all of the data will be lost.  The best safeguard against that is to have multiple drives that you back up to regularly (it should also be noted that RAID is also NOT a backup mechanism.

Question 6

What type of drive does this come with?  Blue?  Green?  There's no mention of it anywhere.

Accepted Answer

sorry but i never received this order cause it was canceled by newegg mentioning that when i placed the order it was already out of stock but newegg didnt update it so, my mnoey was refund

Question 7

All hard drive manufacturers and third party sellers always advertise the sata speed cap of the controller or speeds of "USB 3.0" but a hard drive can never get up to these speeds without a raid.

I want to know the actual sustained read and write speeds of this hard drive. I bought one 8 months ago (different portable hdd) and it didn't read faster than 30MB/s and writing was around 20. Yes i verified my drive was usb 3.0 AND it was plugged into my usb 3.0 SS port. I even updated the drivers. After 3 test PC's the bottleneck was the hard drive. I have a 3TB version but those transfer speeds are less than usb 2.0 even though it was advertised for "USB 3.0 speeds"

How fast is the hard drive?

And does it have that power saver mode that spins down the drive after 20 minutes? I really dislike that feature and wish on my model i could disable it for max performance.

Accepted Answer

Not sure of how many files your transferring vs a couple really large ones but I moved over 2.5tb and it sustained 100mb+ the entire time.  The bottleneck is the drive receiving or pushing the data.  My source drives were all SSD.

Question 8

Does this hard drive shut down after a period of inactivity? I want to plug it into my router and I do not want one that will shut off after a few minutes forcing me to manually reconnect the drive every time I want to access it.

Accepted Answer

I does not..or at least, has not since I've owned it for my purpose.  I use it to store images and keep it permanently connected to a cpu.  It allows me to rdp into that machine for pushing images, pre-schedule them, or take the hd with me to image manually on-site if necessary.

Question 9

looking for an external hard drive to connect to my Speco DVR camera system. it is 2.0 USB connection so I know that I will loose speed but is this a good drive for this application?

Accepted Answer

I believe that it would work.  You would probably need to reformat it with the DVR, since DVR's usually use their own format for storage.

Question 10

What is the voltage it supports? Can I use it abroad where voltage is different that the US?

Accepted Answer

Works great right out of the box. Had it for about 3 or 4 weeks now.

Brand	WD
Series	Elements
Model	WDBWLG0050HBK-NESN

Color	Black
Interface	USB 3.0
Capacity	5TB

Form Factor	3.5"
Dimensions	6.5" x 1.9" x 5.3" (H x W x D)
Weight	2.1 lbs.

WD Elements 5TB USB 3.0 3.5" External Hard Drive WDBWLG0050HBK-NESN Black

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Item#: N82E16822236808