WD 3TB My Book Desktop External Hard Drive – USB 3.0 – WDBFJK0030HBK-NESN

Pros: Lot’s of space. Drive has worked well in a generic enclosure for the last 2 years (see cons below).

Cons: Drive is hardware encrypted by SATA circuit board in hard drive enclosure. Should board fail, your data will be lost. I removed mine from the enclosure 2 years ago & placed in generic enclosure. Copied data to another drive before removing then copied back to WD drive in new enclosure.

Pros: Low power consumption
Price can be cheaper than buying the drive inside by itself
Whisper quiet
No bright lights
Good ventilation holes
Sleek enclosure design

Cons: No fan to dissipate heat
Drive inside is only 5400 RPM
Plug to wall takes up too much room

Overall Review: I’ve only had this for less than a week but so far I’m quite happy with my purchase. I’ve loaded it up about half full and so far everything is working very well. Even though it doesn’t have a fan it doesn’t get too hot. A different enclosure I have without a fan the drive gets so hot I fear it might damage it, this is not the case with this. At best I can feel a slight warms when touching the enclosure or feeling the vents for heat. The drive inside is WD WD30EZRX which spins at only 5400 RPM but only takes up 6W of power on load which is partly why no fan is needed. It is whisper quiet because of the good enclosure design. At arms length away you will not be able to notice that it’s on except for the light which is a nice soft white. The power plug does not have a power brick in the middle so the plug to the wall is a bit of a brick, not oversized but I’d rather the brick be in the middle of the cord to free up space on the wall outlet. I purchased this for cheaper than it costs for the drive inside. Packaged software that it comes with is good but as I’ll be using it for a NAS I have not used it too much. Excellent buy so far. Gave 4 eggs for the cons though I suppose it would have been more expensive had it fixed those issues.

Pros: Great for storing many MKV files and may other large files. I have 2 of these. One on my pc for a nice vast amount of storage and the other connected to my WDTV live HUB. The 1TB was already used up on my live player so another 3TB is definitely great.

Cons: Would like a dedicated power on/off button , so that it can rest when not needed.

Pros: Died after 3 moths! Didnt even last 2 hours, Backed up my files and then came back to it 3 months later and it didnt boot! KNOWN ISSUE!! The enclosure with stop working and the encrypted files will be locked so alllllll your data is gone! YOU have to bust the thing open, voiding the warranty and using it as a standard 3.5 harddrive just to use the horrible thing.

Cons: THE WHOLE THING!!

Overall Review: At least the Hardrive worked after going medevil on it.

Pros: works perfectly with my MACBOOK PRO. I would buy this model again. Fast Delivery

Cons: None

Pros: FAST on a good USB 3 controller. I get consistent large-file transfers of about 125 MB/s. I use this drive for nightly backups and it sits quietly, scooping up all the data I need it to. It uses a standard USB 3.0 micro port so if you misplace the supplied cord you can use a common micro USB cord from your phone in a pinch and replacement 3.0 cables are easy to buy online.

Cons: The first item wasn’t quite DOA, but it had some unrecoverable errors during my initial 1.2 TB backup. The 2nd drive had a brief issue after a firmware update but it resolved itself. The plastic casing feels a little cheap compared to some of the nicer (and more expensive) models like the MyBook Studio but at this price, I don’t expect premium aesthetic design — it’s about the same as my 2 year old MyBook Mac so at least the quality is consistent.

Overall Review: The first defective drive was exchanged by Newegg since it had only been a few weeks. I posted a review when the 2nd drive started acting up: Strange noises prompted me to run diagnostics and update firmware. After firmware update the drive was shutting itself down after 10-15 seconds of being plugged in. I submitted an RMA request to Western Digital and received a prompt reply less than 1 bus. day later. By that time the drive had apparently been rebooted enough to work normally again.

There are always failures in any series of hard drives and I would prefer not to deal with issues like this, but at least with a reputable brand like there is good warranty support.

Pros: I bought this 7 months ago for the great price of $119 and I love it so. I’ve thrown large 100+ GB file transfers at it through USB3.0 and have had no problems whatsoever. I stream from it with no hiccups and no issues at all. I can’t recommend this enough.

Cons: It doesn’t make sandwiches.

Overall Review: I remember paying more for a 500GB hard drive years ago.

Pros: Reasonably quiet.
Great value.
Runs reasonably cool, just keep it well ventilated so you don’t fry the poor thing.
Easy to set up.
Ideal for music and media vault duty in most homes.
Distributes different hi-rez music streams to several locations at once without a hiccup.
Works amazingly fast when using JRiver Media Center.

Cons: LED light on the front can be distracting in dark rooms.
Built-in Twonky server app is horrifying slow if you’re releying on it as the primary server software over DLNA. This isn’t a problem if you’re employing a dedicated computer running media server software like JRiver Media Center, Media Monkey and the like.

Overall Review: Absurdly easy to set up. I was stunned that it wasn’t far more difficult.
This drive is used primarily as the centralized network storage drive for my music library. It serves multiple computers and Android tablets using JRiver Media Center on Gigabit ethernet and Wi-Fi. The tablets mostly pipe the tunes to the ridiculously good G-Boom bluetooth portable speakers (great for shop, garage and outdoors). Most of the music files are in lossless FLAC format so they’re quite a bit larger but far better sounding than MP3. This little NAS has had ZERO problems handing five simultaneous music data streams at once.
If this thing dies, I’ll likely get another. To get appreciably better, I would have to upgrade to an Intel Zeon-based FreeNAS server running RAID 1 mirroring, with dual Gigabit LAN connections and THAT runs about $1500 and up, waaay up.