WD Elements WDBWLG0160HBK-NESN 16 TB Desktop Hard Drive - External

I'm always on the lookout for great deals, especially ones coming from B&H Photo. And this 14TB WD Elements desktop hard drive was one of them.Back in March of this year, I'd bought a 12TB WD Elements external hard drive from B&H for $180 with free shipping and zero sales tax since I'd purchased it with my PayBoo/B&H credit card. That works out to be $15/TB! The latest deal I bought from B&H was this 14TB WD external hard drive for $260, which translates to $18.57/TB. This was still an excellent buy considering the price of electronics, especially hard drives, has recently skyrocketed due to the COVID supply chain shortages. B&H's closest competitor was $20 higher, and I would've had to pay another $20 in sales tax. That made it a $40 savings for me.These ... MoreI'm always on the lookout for great deals, especially ones coming from B&H Photo. And this 14TB WD Elements desktop hard drive was one of them.Back in March of this year, I'd bought a 12TB WD Elements external hard drive from B&H for $180 with free shipping and zero sales tax since I'd purchased it with my PayBoo/B&H credit card. That works out to be $15/TB! The latest deal I bought from B&H was this 14TB WD external hard drive for $260, which translates to $18.57/TB. This was still an excellent buy considering the price of electronics, especially hard drives, has recently skyrocketed due to the COVID supply chain shortages. B&H's closest competitor was $20 higher, and I would've had to pay another $20 in sales tax. That made it a $40 savings for me.These ultra-high capacity USB hard drives are great for storing my huge collection of Blu-rays and DVDs, both as back-ups and as a convenient means of playback without having to shuffle through my extensive Blu-ray and DVD collection (I have over 2000 titles), opening the case (sometimes finding an empty case since my wife or kids took the disc somewhere else and never bothered to put it back!), inserting the discs into the Blu-ray player, and wait for it to cycle on. Now, I can quickly sort and scroll through with my computer to find a movie I want, and watch it using CyberLink's PowerDVD that I'd also bought from B&H for $58; another great value.Needless-to-say, aside from the convenience of playing Blu-rays and DVDs from my computer, having the ability to backup and store all my Blu-rays and DVDs onto a couple of ultra-high capacity, portable hard drives is priceless since I've invested a small fortune collecting and building my movie and TV series collection. At an average of $20 per Blu-ray and $15 per DVD, that's over $25,000 in purchases I've made over the years! What's more, I live in a wild-land fire prone area, and to gather up 2000+ boxed discs during an evacuation at a moment's notice would be almost impossible, not to mention the time and space that are required, especially in the midst of an evacuation, I wouldn't have the luxury of either. Now, if and when the time has come to book out of Dodge, all I have to do is grab two book-size hard drives, together with our other more important items and belongings, I no longer have to worry about loosing my entire movie and TV collection.As for the Western Digital portable USB hard drive, I've always had good experience with WD hard drives in general. Of all the external hard drives I've owned and used over the years (nearly a hundred), I've never had a WD drive failed on me (fingers crossed! Lol), except one, which was entirely my fault since I'd dropped it onto a hardwood floor while the drive was in use and spinning. All of the other failed hard drives (for no apparent reasons at all - they'd just up and died) I've owned have either been Seagate, Maxtor, and Quantum - the latter two were inherited by Seagate through mergers and acquisitions. But that's just my own experience, yours might differ.Also, it just seems to me that the WD drives have faster throughput than other hard drives I've used in the past, but that's an anecdotal observation,again based on my own experience.All-in-all, I've had good experience with Western Digital drives, and expect that this 14TB desktop unit will provide me with the same longevity and reliable service.

I initially thought this drive was defective, but after checking with Western Digital, it appears the design geniuses there thought it would be a good idea to flutter the disk head every 5 seconds. Not every minute. Not every hour. EVERY 5 SECONDS! I guarantee you, IT WILL DRIVE YOU CRAZY!!!I've been told there is no way to alter this setting.Presumably this is to increase the life of the drive. The funny thing is that I have several WD external drives that I have been using for almost 20 years, that do not have this annoying feature, and they continue to work just fine.While the drive functions properly today, the frequent chattering, causing unnecessary wear and tear, makes me doubt the long term reliability of this drive, as well as WD's disregard for ... MoreI initially thought this drive was defective, but after checking with Western Digital, it appears the design geniuses there thought it would be a good idea to flutter the disk head every 5 seconds. Not every minute. Not every hour. EVERY 5 SECONDS! I guarantee you, IT WILL DRIVE YOU CRAZY!!!I've been told there is no way to alter this setting.Presumably this is to increase the life of the drive. The funny thing is that I have several WD external drives that I have been using for almost 20 years, that do not have this annoying feature, and they continue to work just fine.While the drive functions properly today, the frequent chattering, causing unnecessary wear and tear, makes me doubt the long term reliability of this drive, as well as WD's disregard for customer real-world use and satisfaction.I wish I would have know about this beforehand so I could have avoided the purchase.

I bought this WD Elements 6TB drive for attaching to a Synology DS220J NAS as a backup service. My DS220J NAS uses DSM (DiskStation Manager) V7.1, which supports backing up of the NAS contents to a USB locally-connected drive.It was important for me to install a local backup service for my DS220J NAS, because I use it as a local cloud facility for storing application files. This is instead of storing these files locally on individual computers and using the NAS itself as backup. This arrangement allows me to share application files across several computers, i.e. the DS220J NAS acts as a central storage facility for all network computers.The WD Elements storage drive fulfills the NAS backup role admirably, with the DS220J DSM software managing backup scheduling ... MoreI bought this WD Elements 6TB drive for attaching to a Synology DS220J NAS as a backup service. My DS220J NAS uses DSM (DiskStation Manager) V7.1, which supports backing up of the NAS contents to a USB locally-connected drive.It was important for me to install a local backup service for my DS220J NAS, because I use it as a local cloud facility for storing application files. This is instead of storing these files locally on individual computers and using the NAS itself as backup. This arrangement allows me to share application files across several computers, i.e. the DS220J NAS acts as a central storage facility for all network computers.The WD Elements storage drive fulfills the NAS backup role admirably, with the DS220J DSM software managing backup scheduling without placing a burden on the network. The WD Elements drive is woken-up and put to sleep by the DSM software, as required for the backup schedule. As the WD Elements drive is only active for 20-30 minutes, twice a day, purchasing a WD Red disk was not necessary.