Customer Ratings & Reviews

Fantastic storage for the price, small enough form-factor to fit nicely on my desk.

I originally bought a 8 TB external that I believed would work with the PS4 Pro unfortunately that was not the case. So figured I would try this out, a employee recommended this unit that he has on his PS4 Pro and it worked like a charm. Went home hooked it up to the back USB port on PS4 Pro connected it to the External Hard Drive, let it sit for a sec then plugged in the power for the external hard drive (yes, this external hard drive needs power adapter to work) and boom. After about 1 minute or 2 the PS4 Pro recognized it, so I was already impressed, last one I tried didn’t even recognize it after about 10 minutes or so. After the message appeared in top left (external hard drive detected) (give or take message being a little off on wording I suppose). Then I went through proper setting via PlayStation website (super easy) and let the PS4 Pro format the drive to work. Now I can say I have a 8TB hard drive on it and room for all the games I need. Make sure your PlayStation is up to date, version 6.20 is what mine is on. Thanks WD, made my night. Game on friends!

This 8TB External Drive is fast and reliable! I'm getting another just for the book I'm writing.

Been great so far. I only wish there was a power switch. I feel like HDDs last longer when turned on and off. Really I have had many many Western Digital Drives over the past 25 years and they are the most reliable. I have only had 1 drive out of about 75 over time go bad. Just wish I could turn it off when its not in use. It likes to move even when the computer is off.

This product is great for what it is, plenty of space but still a Hard Disk drive, which means it's loud, slower than an SSD and it seems the more media I add to it the slower it is to search through the folders. Great for backing up, it may have a faster connection than my 2 external SSD's but I wouldn't recommend using it as a cache or media disk for video editing. I use Adobe Editing Software so I now use the 2 SSDs for active projects and use the WD My Book for backing up old projects and footage. The biggest benefit is a bang for your buck. If you're looking for more storage space and don't need crazy fast transfer speeds, this is a great product, otherwise, I recommend using SSD, if you have the money for it.

So I was waiting For the PlayStation update for the longest, I had all this games and I had to keep deleting them because my PS4 fills up so fast, and every time I wanted to play I had to wait for it to download. This was perfect after the update, I went with the 8 TB, and now I don't have to worry about space anymore and play all the games whenever I want or movies and music.

- A lot of space for the price (at the time this was purchased). - The 3-year warranty is great. - It tends to run hotter than other drives, topping out around 55C during long file transfers. Having some type of fan push air through the vents on the top or bottom of the case can drop these temperatures a lot. - The drive model number in my enclosure is a WD80EDAZ-11TA3A0 according to CrystalDiskInfo and HWiNFO64. - The top half of the enclosure is a fingerprint magnet.

Plugged it in and it worked. Just what I wanted for mass storage. I do NOT leave it on and connected, using it ONLY when I have files to transfer. Files that are headed there go first to a 4TB USB drive that sits next to the computer. Every week I tranfer those files to a larger storage drive. I do conventional and astrophotography, images and video, and generate a LOT of raw image data. Even though I pare it down it still ends up being a lot. I don't do RAID and offsite duplicates .... if I lose my raw data I'll miss it but Western Civilization won't collapse because of it. Finished work is in duplicate, the raw data is not. Attached is an unretouched photo of actual digital photo data. : )

This MY Book external hard drive is excellent. 8TB is a good amount of space for any household. I use this hard drive as a backup to all my computer files which includes family photos, videos, etc. The design of the hard drive is also great, and installation took less than 10 minutes.

Good device that serves the purpose I need it for. However I dislike that it's a bit noisy when in operation. I also dislike that it needs to be connected to a power source just to transfer photos. That limits my flexibility and usage considerably... But then again, it was my fault that I missed that in the description.

I needed an external storage for my files since I stream on Mixer constantly and my internal hd was getting full. So, I had this 8TB My Book delivered to my house. I've been using it since 5/26, and the last backup I have recorded was 6/18. Less than a month! I used all of the original cables and power supply, I didn't knock it over, and I tried all of the USB's on my gaming rig, so it's nothing I did. One day, the WD software and PC says it's unavailable, and disk configuration says it's RAW data instead of NTFS. My heart sinks... I'm so disappointed with WD. I have multiple old WD external HD's from them that haven't failed me, and this is the 2nd one I bought this year to have failed me. I originally bought a 5TB EasyStore from them as well earlier this year, and that failed too. Luckily, I didn't have anything important in that HD. Right now, I'm frantically trying to save old vids and data from the My Book external drive, and then I'll return it to the store for a refund. If I had run 'Error Checking' on both drives before using them, I would've known that both were going to die on me. Don't be me. Find a different product to store your data offline.

Had this drive delivered yesterday and it’s already giving me issues. I formatted the drive for my Mac, and after backing up a couple TBs of data overnight and most of today as of writing this review, I tried to eject the drive safely on my Mac and it would not un-mount. I didn’t want to force eject it so I let it sit for a while to see if it would stop whatever it was doing and eject normally, but it never did. I opted to restart my machine, but afterwards I realized this is probably the same thing as force ejecting it since macOS tried to safely eject when rebooting then just force it to un-mount. I moved the drive to another room/machine to back up data on that Mac, and that was the last time the drive worked as expected. The drive now constantly and randomly ejects/un-mounts, which as you can imagine makes it pretty unusable. I’ve attached a screen shot showing the drive mounted as “8TB” right below the macOS warning to eject drives safely, as it now just does this cycle nonstop. I’m not sure if it’s the HDD or the case that’s causing the issues, I will say I shucked the drive (so much for returning it lol) and while it still unmounts randomly it is nowhere near as bad as when it was in the case. It has a tiny logic board that provides power and USB-C confections that plugs into the SATA port, I’m hoping it’s this little thing that’s bad and not the drive itself. I’m fine using it like this until I can get a new case for it.

Great product with the Best Buy sale well worth the price

This is the 4th My Book I own, these are very heavy duty and are the only ones I trust to use. Highly recommend!

This model is the current generation of the My Book line of desktop drives. I've owned older models and purchased them for clients. When 4TB would suffice more often I've gotten My Passport drives. They are much more compact and do not require an external power adapter. My Book drives have proven reliable and good performers in my experience. They have incrementally improved across generations. This model features a new case design which most notably replaced the rounded case that has been the norm since the original models years ago. The new case isn't attractive for me but it should have little effect on use. The MyBook drives are not just for computers, but great on game consoles. A friend and I put one on his Xbox One. We just plugged in the power, plugged in the USB and followed the prompts on screen to reformat the drive as external storage. Easy Peasy. BOTTOM LINE (for the impatient): The new model is a little bit faster than the last one I got a couple of years ago. It's faster than a similar My Passport drive, perhaps an advantage with the physically larger drive. This model (I got the 6TB size) is available in sizes up to 8TB. A pretty massive amount of storage on a USB drive! This drive shines with sequential reads and writes using Crystal DiskMark. This My Book has a new design that replaces rounded corners with pointy ones and adds some odd (to me) styling to the case. The new case shows fingerprints and scratches much more than the old. It's a purely aesthetic change. If these differences are not important for you or you prefer the old model's aesthetics, you may want to shop for the older model My Book. If you want more details, read on... SUMMARY: The My Book USB 3.0 drives are simple to use and come with reasonable software tools and backup/sync software. The drive includes: WD Backup, WD Security and WD Drive Utilities. I have my own backup solution and have not explored this software. If these are of interest, be sure to check for newer versions on the WD web site. Pluses: + This drive works fine with Windows, Linux or Mac out of the box. With Linux or Mac it performs best when reformatted with a native file system for the respective operating system. + This generation has 8TB, 6TB, 4TB and 3TB single drive models. Dual drive 12TB and 16TB models are available too. + This drive is faster than the last generation I used. Just noticeable in practical use. + The form factor of the new drive is almost exactly the same as before except for pointy corners. + It comes with a 4ft USB 3.0 cable (much nicer than the very short My Passport cables!) Minuses: - A power adapter is required. Happily it has a 6ft cord which is thoughtfully long. - The redesign of the drive case is not a plus for me. Not much of a minus either as it's not why I selected this drive. The worst thing is going with pointy corners. From a handling perspective rounded corners are nicer. - The warranty has been reduced from 3 years for last year's model to 2 years for this one. IN THE BOX: The My Book comes in a easy to open retail package containing the drive, power adapter and USB 3.0 cable. There are a couple small pieces of paper for warranty and quick-start. That's it. TESTING: I tested My Book 6TB model using CrystalDiskMark benchmark software and by copying 11GB folder of updates and files to the drive. This was to compare the benchmark with real-world copying. The 11GB folder has a broad mix of file sizes and types including files an over 2GB iso DVD images. For my testing the My Book drive was connected to the Renasas USB 3.0 chip set on my Dell Precision E6500 laptop. I have the latest Renasas drivers installed. The laptop also has a Samsung EVO SSD as the hard drive (matters for my real-world copy testing). CRYSTALDISKMARK Results: Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 173.515 MB/s Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 172.732 MB/s Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 0.666 MB/s [ 162.6 IOPS] Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 2.334 MB/s [ 569.8 IOPS] Sequential Read (T= 1) : 172.583 MB/s Sequential Write (T= 1) : 168.193 MB/s Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 0.595 MB/s [ 145.3 IOPS] Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 2.272 MB/s [ 554.7 IOPS] Test : 1024 MiB [F: 0.0% (0.2/5589.0 GiB)] (x9) [Interval=5 sec] REAL WORLD COPY: In my real world copy test the new My Book drive was noticeably faster than the older My Book. More on the writing than reading side. It peaked out at about 300MB/s with large files. It never dropped below 180MB/s even with large amounts of small files being copied to the drive. The newer drive may have a larger on-drive write cache or maybe it's just a bit faster drive. Maybe both. With big copies the new My Book may save you a few seconds here or there, but it's an evolution across models with each new one performing a little better. CONCLUSIONS: The My Book line of drives from Western Digital has been very good over the years to me and to my clients. This reliable and good to excellent performing line has a long positive history with me. This WD My Book model is an evolution over the older models I've used. I'll pick it for new purchases over the older model, but won't rush out to replace older drives. The new case design is not aesthetically pleasing to me . Overall it's a excellent successor to a 5 star predecessor and continues to be a very good external storage choice. For making improvements that outweigh a small misstep in case design and not making a mess of something that has been working well for a long time This new generation of My Book drives is worth 5 stars in my opinion. Hope this helps someone!

Do not recommend this drive. Mine was very loud (audible over PC fans at full blast) and ran extremely hot. I saw it hit 55C with CrystalDiskInfo before I threw in the towel and decided to return it. Real shame as the price seemed like a good deal for 8 TB of storage but I think I'll be better off being more judicious about what gets backed up and using my older 4 TB drive.

WD Desktop External HDD Highlights 8TB Storage Capacity USB 3.0 Interface Includes AC Adapter 256-Bit AES Hardware Encryption Includes WD Backup Software Acronis True Image WD Edition Software Windows & Mac Compatible May Require Reformatting Before Use Features With the 8TB My Book Desktop USB 3.0 External Hard Drive from WD it is easy to back up important files and create system backups using the included WD Backup software for Windows or Time Machine for Mac. In addition to simplifying the backup process for both Windows and Mac computers, this hard drive features 256-bit AES hardware encryption to ensure stored files remain secure. The My Book Desktop drive features a USB 3.0 port for fast data transfers and comes exFAT formatted for Windows and Mac, making it easy to get up and running in no time. Note: Compatibility may vary depending on user's hardware configuration and operating system. Reformatting is required for use with Apple Time Machine. General Features Complete Backup Equipped with WD Backup software for Windows and Apple Time Machine compatibility for Mac, the My Book desktop hard drive can back up your photos, videos, music, and documents. Password Protection with Hardware Encryption The My Book drive's built-in 256-bit AES hardware encryption with WD Security tools helps keep your content private and safe. Just activate password protection and set your own personalized password. WD Reliability Millions of people around the world trust their data to My Book desktop storage. Designed to meet WD's requirements for durability, shock tolerance, and reliability, they back up the trusted My Book desktop storage with a limited 3-year warranty. Watch the Power of My Book Come to Life We live hectic lives and generate tons of digital content. My Book desktop storage has massive storage capacity so you can confidently back up the files that make up your digital life. Do More with Discovery Included WD Discovery software connects to popular social media and cloud storage services, like Facebook, Dropbox, and Google Drive. Import your photos, videos, and docs to the My Book drive to help preserve your online life. WD Discovery can also be used to manage your drive with WD Drive Utilities. May require reformatting for other operating systems Easy to Use My Book desktop storage is ready to use out of the box so you can start transferring files, saving your memories, and backing up right away. It comes with all the software you need to help protect your data, including WD Backup and WD Security software, and is compatible with Time Machine. Compatibility Formatted exFAT for out-of-the-box compatibility with Windows 10 and 8.1, plus macOS 10.13 and later This without a doubt is the greatest external hard drive on the market right now at a great price & a brand the military use which is sn added bonus & make2s a person feel safer. I absolutely recommend this brand of external hard drive for all of your computer needs!

Do not buy this drive if you are trying to do Time Machine backups on a Mac. WD has replaced my 8TB My Book twice. All 3 drives throw the same intermittent error saying Time Machine can't complete the backup. The exact message... Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while creating the backup folder. Hours on the phone with Apple and WD. No resolution. If you Google the error you'll see it has been an issue since 2016.

I bought this hard drive as my existing NAS drive started to fail. I needed lots of space for the years of family videos I had on file so the 8TB was perfect. It was a very easy setup - just plug into my Windows 10 Laptop and it works. However, the drive is formatted so that it also supports the Apple OS. As a result, my online backup service (begins with a "C" and rhymes with Kryptonite) did not recognize the drive. I had to reformat the drive to NTFS. Simple to do but I probably voided the warranty and it was a good learning lesson for future purchases. There is another drawback to this drive - it's constantly processing even though there is no activity between it and the laptop. This results in a clicking/vibration which gets annoying. Overall, it's a lot of space for a good price, but I recommend shopping around and/or purchasing a SSD depending on your need.

WD backup drives are the most reliable ones i have used, I have both an 8TB and a 4TB one and they work perfectly. As a computer tech, I think everyone who uses a computer should have an external backup drive, the cost of data recovery in the event of a hard drive failure is astronomical, why pay $1000 to POSSIBLY recover your data from a failed drive when you can pay $100 (price ranges depending on capacity) for once of these and not have to worry about that