WD 5TB Elements Portable External Hard Drive for Windows, USB 3.2 Gen 1/USB 3.0 for PC & Mac, Plug and Play Ready - WDBU6Y0050BBK-WESN

I love the compact size of this 5TB harddrive. It offers good performance and is a good value for money. The compact size, makes it easy to store and transport. It is plug and play, simply connect and use it with your devices. The speed of upload and diwnload makes this a fantastic choice for storing your data. I use it for photos, and love that I can put it into my camera bag and take it with my on assignment. I've found it very durable and the performance is excellent. Definitely recommend.

TL;dr – it works great. Treat it with respect, be prepared to toss the cable it comes with (because they fail) and enjoy a huge amount of storage for a reasonable amount of money.You’ve probably read a ton of reviews on external drives and have arrived here. I’ve been in the tech biz over 44 years and was there when 128Kbyte 8” floppy disks were considered advanced. I’ve used a LOT of different drives.Let’s put this drive into perspective: it is NOT a “portable drive”, it’s an external drive that you can choose to move from place to place. AS WITH ALL SUCH DRIVES, it contains precision moving parts; if you drop it, it will likely break. If you move it around when it’s operating, it probably won’t like it. If you drop your laptop, it will likely break. If you want an external drive that you can really move around, get an SSD.I purchased one of these drives for cloud-storage and archival purposes. Simply put, I needed somewhere to dump large data collections for essentially read-only access as well as having a buffer area for cloud storage synchronization purposes (lots of r/w access to the drive). It worked so well I purchased another and might even get a 3rd.Cloud storage is great for frequently accessed data, but for your video collection, your vast music collection or the 130GB of pictures your spouse took last month, you might want off-line storage. This is a great choice.Is it fast? Slower than an SSD but faster than many external hard drives out there. If you want speed, use the local SSD in your device or get an external SSD drive. If you don’t want that expense, this is still a great drive.In operation the drive is whisper quiet and runs slightly warm. You may have read about the “click of death”, well, yeah, it happened to me too. It won’t run on an overloaded unpowered USB hub (click, click due to lack of power). The cable it comes with is frankly troublesome and honestly you should invest in a replacement. Yup, click, click, click because the cable failed (fortunately I had another to hand, doesn’t everyone?). All that will happen with other drives too, so it’s nothing unusual.My system: Win10 Pro and Win10 Home on Lenovo, Surface Books and Surface Pro; works out of the box just fine.For those complaining that the drive doesn’t work with some backup software; that’s not the drives fault. For those complaining about the speed for gaming purposes, that’s not the drives’ fault either, you should have purchased an SSD.Yes, it will work with Onedrive; just create a junction from your Onedrive folder to the required folder in the external drive.mklink /J srcFolder destFolderSince you have a large capacity drive for large data sets, robocopy (part of Windows) will be your friend as well as mklink to create junctions from your main drive to connection points in external drives filesystems.What happens if the drive goes down? As with any other drive, you might have lost your data. The solution is to (gasp) purchase two drives and sync one with the other.Pro’s: 5TB of storage for <$100. Quiet, fast and gets the job done. It’s a disk drive, it’s not there to be exciting.Con’s: I didn’t like the cable; invest $6 on a better one. As with ALL DRIVES, you need to treat it nicely.

Worked Great on a brand new 2022 MacBook Pro with the M1 Pro Chip. It's amazing how cheap HDDs are now. I will continue buying them until the price of external SDDs goes down. You can literally get twice as much storage capacity with HDDs for half the price of a SSD.As always, with external drives used to do backups on Mac computers, you must reformat the disk before doing the backup and this WD is no different. Reformatting is a very easy task as always, and it takes no more than a few minutes to get the external drive ready for your Mac.However, I ran into some issues with Time Machine on the newest version of Monterey (the one that came installed in the laptop). It seems like it no matter what format you choose when reformatting the external drive, Time Machine automatically reformats the drive on its own to the new Apple File System (APFS) when you do your first backup. Not only that, but once Time Machine reformats the drive to APFS and completes the backup, then it blocks the HDD and you cannot use it to save anything else in it, drop files, etc. It basically locks the drive for backups only. Oh, and with the APFS format you cannot use the drive to backup older Apple computers. I NEVER had this happened in any of my Apple computers before.I tried a few other HDDs from other brands to ensure this was not an issue of the WD brand. They all did the same, so I knew it was an Apple software glitch issue. It took several calls to Apple to figure out that yes, Time Machine does this. The only way around this issue is to create a "new volume" in the external HDD. Then you can use the separate volume to save other things, drop files, etc. You could create as many volumes as you can, and the APFS makes it very easy. When you plug the HDD, the volume for the backup pops on your desktop (Time Machine color), along with any other volumes you created (yellow color).Hope this saves somebody out there a lot of frustration and aggravation trying to figure out what the issue with Time Machine and external drives using the newest Monterey version. I also hope Apple fixes this problem. It makes no sense that you select a specific reformat option but then Time Machine ignores it and reformats to APFS against your wish and block the drive in the process.The WD external drive works great. It is a really great value for 2TBs of storage, and it is a very small and lightweight drive. All the issues mentioned are specific to the Apple operating system that would happen with any HDD of any brand.

The WD 5TB Elements Portable External Hard Drive for Windows, USB 3.2 Gen is a great product. It appears to be well made and has preformed very well for me. It is very fast using USB 3.2. I highly recommend this item.

I've used WD portable external HDD's for over 10 years as a backup in my personal and small office computer systems as a back up media. These are terrific, they just keep working and working and working! Small, easy to attach via cable and fast too. The capacity keeps getting larger over time which is good as we keep storing more files over time as well. The size of these is pretty small, I can easily fit them in my briefcase to take home with me. We keep one off site at all times so we always have a backup that is safe in case of any calamity.