Western Digital WD 16TB Elements Desktop External Hard Drive, USB 3.0 for plug-and-play storage - WDBWLG0160HBK-NESN

Well, I have to edit this review to include a NEW western digital drive I recently ordered (because amazon doesn't let you leave separate reviews for different drives made by the same company. My reviews here are for VERY different products and we should be allowed to review them separately, but... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ------------------------------------------------------------ REVIEW for the "WD Elements Portable External Hard Drive for Windows, USB 3.2 Gen 1/USB 3.0 for PC & Mac, WDBU6Y0020BBK-WESN": Anyway, the TWO terabyte WD drive I bought on January 1, 2026 for $79.99 had obvious signs of use. There was a small but noticeable 'ding' on the right side of the drive, and the CrystalDiskInfo utility software showed that the drive had been used for 3 hours. That's far more than any drive that's fresh & straight from the factory will have accrued for simple testing. I kept this drive because I needed it immediately, but I'm not happy about it having been USED and the 'ding' chipped off on the side that shows it had been dropped. Even so, it's performing wonderfully (so far) on a new Mac & an old Windows computer, but time will tell the true tale. ------------------------------------------------------------ REVIEW for the "WD 20TB Elements Desktop External Hard Drive, USB 3.0 drive, WDBWLG0200HBK-NESN" I ordered the WD 20TB Elements Desktop External Hard Drive in early May 2025, wiped it and re-formatted it as NTFS for Windows, and then transferred a ton of backups to it. (A little note: 20 TB drives have an *actual* capacity of 18.19 TB). This WD drive is reliable, sturdy, and a winner by every metric. It's a very quiet drive (I only ever hear a very soft & short 'brrr' when it's waking up, but then it falls silent and remains quiet for the rest of the time that it's active). My drive is on all day, yet I never hear any sounds while it's working. I actually forget that it's on until I need to search it for something! Even with my ancient PC, this WD drive had smooth transfers of up to 180 MB/sec. When that PC died and I connected the WD drive to a new mac laptop, the transfer speed was even faster. This drive has been in use every single day for almost 8 months and it's still just as quick and quiet as the first day I used it. Of course, if you format any drive as NTFS like I did, and then you use that drive with a Mac, you can only copy files FROM the drive while it's connected to the mac device, and you can't can't copy files TO the drive. I thought I'd only use this with my old windows comp and didn't forsee its overdue demise so I used the NTFS format... but since I can access those files, it's no biggie. I'm about to order another WD drive and I'll format it as ExFat so that it'll have full read & write abilities on both mac & windows. This is a great drive and if you're a dual-OS user like me, just format your drive accordingly. It's nice to be able to have the best of both worlds. :)

ChangedMind · 2025-12-30 · via amazon

It's pretty fast. Runs well, loads up pretty quick. Transfer rate is nice and smooth. Doesn't seem to get very hot like some of the drives. Sits up. Nice. Doesn't fall over very easy. In other words, it's pretty stable.

great game. runs good on my kindle fire. love it · 2026-05-14 · via amazon

I work with hundreds of hard drives per year. I also recover data from hard drives, so I have a decent idea of what we're dealing with here. To put it bluntly, all consumer level hard drives are not great, but WD (Which bought out Hitachi Storage) is simply the best. It's why they cost more, and it's worth every cent. I've had brand new Seagate drives dead, right out of the 20-count boxes we get. Speed wise, I am not really sure how fast these are compared to other brands, but with SSDs, I view hard drives as a cheap/slow storage space. And 1 TB is a LOT of data if you think about it. I'm writing this on the 14TB drive, but that can be hundreds of thousands of pictures for example. So the real question is "What would you do if you lost them all?" Take it from me, it is always "When" is it going to die and not "if". The drive will fail, no matter what. So you should always have a backup drive. If this is your backup drive, then you're all set. If this is your "main" drive, then consider buying a second, even if the second one is a Seagate - point being you are covered when the main one breaks. I have taken these apart before (Not the more modern very large ones) and those drives did work as internal drives, but I would hesitate to do that simply because you're probably going to trash your warrantee when you try and return a case that has a bunch of broken tabs (The cases for these elements drives are terrible and fall apart when you try to take them apart). My drive shipped with a rather small power brick, which was a nice touch. I think the cable length was something like 5 feet, so it's not a super short cord. Used the USB to connect to a Windows 11 laptop and it found the drive right away without any issues at all. If you use this as a permanent drive, e.g. a home network share, then you can go into Windows Device Manager and switch the drive type to include caching which speeds up the drive a bit (At the expense of data loss if you do not eject the drive before you yank the plug). If data integrity is essential, then for consumers, I would recommend the Red series drives as they are made for home network storage units. For corporate, the Enterprise drives (Which are usually SAS and not SATA) are the way to go. Of course none of those are USB drives, but I'm throwing this out there in case you have the option of going with an internal drive. At the end of the day though, like I started with, data integrity is the most important thing for me, and it doesn't get better than Western Digital.

Trusty Dusty Tries New Things · 2025-10-22 · via amazon

Best Buy

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MSI

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Newegg

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Newegg (Open Box)

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