Western Digital 4TB Black My Passport Portable External Hard Drive - USB 3.0 - WDBYFT0040BBK-WESN

Bought a 4TB drive on Feb 26th had been working great until yesterday when out of no where it stopped working and my computer wont recognize it anymore. The light is on and I can hear the drive spinning but several computers wont recognize it. I contacted Western Digital and a new was being sent however data recovery is not normally part of the warranty. I called Western Digital back the next day to talk about the data recovery and why this isn't covered on a device that is 2 months old. I spoke to Eunice (A++ service) she talked to her supervisor, because my device is only 2 months old Western Digital stepped up and did the right thing and is allowing me to send the device back to them to have the data recovered and placed onto a new 4TB My passport drive at no charge. It was going to cost me $400-$900 from a 3rd party company if Western Digital did not allow me to send it back to have the data recovered. Thank you for standing behind your product and doing the right thing I will purchase more drives from you in the future because of your actions today. Thank you SO MUCH Eunice from Western Digital and your supervisor your understanding and doing the right thing is much appreciated you now have a loyal customer for life.

Like many people, I have a lot of photos, music files, and other content on my computer's hard drive that would be a nuisance to replace (or in some cases would be lost forever) if my hard drive failed. But also like many people, I haven't been very good about backing up my data. So, I wanted a single, high-capacity, portable hard drive that I could connect to my computer and in a few keystrokes back up everything I didn't want to lose. This was the answer. This hard drive couldn't be easier to use. You simply connect it to your computer with the USB 3.0 cable and the drive prompts you to install several small programs which allow you to control the drive's settings. It took me less than three minutes to run through the self-checks for drive faults and create a password to protect the drive's contents. Once you have done that you run the "backup" program, select which folders from your computer you want to back up, and set the schedule/frequency for the backups to occur, and... voila, that's it! What do I like about this hard drive? 1) Easy to use. It comes with several USEFUL programs pre-installed but no extra junk programs or apps, and scheduling backups is ridiculously simple. 2) Speed. With the USB 3.0 cable backing up several terabytes of data took far less time than I expected. What do I NOT like about this hard drive? 1) I don't know that I would call this "super portable," but that depends on what you consider portable. It's not going to fit in your pants pocket, but it would easily fit into a purse or briefcase. It's a little on the heavy side, but not prohibitively so. 2) I do wish the USB 3.0 cable was longer. It's only about a foot long, so unless you find another cable to use the drive will need to be very close to your computer! I would absolutely purchase this again.

I have two Samsung 850 Evo 500GB SSD's and I was looking to backup my important information to an external hard drive in the 4TB-5TB range. I spent a long time debating if I should get the WD 4TB Black USB 3.0 My Passport External Hard Drive (WDBYFT0040BBK-WESN) or the Seagate Expansion 5TB Desktop External Hard Drive USB 3.0 (STEB5000100). I looked at all the Seagate reviews stating the hard drive failing, so I decided to stick with Western Digital. I've owned many Western Digital hard drives over the years and they have always performed quite nicely. PROS: Very small and compact! Fast with decent speeds I love the black sleek case on one half with the other half featuring a rugged design Even the little white LED is pleasant to the eyes Works great on Windows 10 and Linux Mint 18.3 Cinnamon! Cons No cons really. The cable is a little short. I also noticed on Amazon the prices for the WD 4TB Black USB 3.0 My Passport Portable External Hard Drive (WDBYFT0040BBK-WESN) are quite sporadic in nature. I purchased this drive at a price point of $113 and after a few hours I saw the price drop to $111. The following day the price fluctuates all the way to $119 for the black version and then drops down to $116. It's not much of a difference in price, but I found it quite odd to have prices fluctuate like you are buying stocks on the stock market. Other Thoughts: I'm very glad I went with Western Digital. I've always had great experiences with Western Digital products. If you are on the fence about which external hard drive to buy, I would highly recommend this drive. The performance is solid and so far I have not had any issues on Windows 10 and Linux Mint 18.3 Cinnamon. Buy this WD 4TB Black USB 3.0 My Passport External Hard Drive (WDBYFT0040BBK-WESN) and you won't regret it! Update: Still working!

My review is for the 4TB version. I *only* bought this for use with my Xbox One S and this review is based *solely* on that experience. You power your Xbox on and once your home screen has loaded up, plug in this external HDD (this unit is bus powered, meaning it does not require an external power supply) and after a short wait, your Xbox will ask if you want to format it for use as external storage. Select "Yes" or whatever the prompt asks (sorry, I don't remember the exact details; it's been quite some time from purchase to review) and you're on your way! The setup steps [on the Xbox] were abundantly clear and entire the process took about two minutes. The Xbox installs games to this external HDD as quick as it does to the internal drive. Games installed on this external HDD play very smoothly, but take a while to start up. This drive is near completely silent and of a good pocket size with a small footprint that doesn't cram up a lot of real estate in/on your entertainment center or whatever you gaming setup is.

I purchased Five WD 4TB Passport drives to back up a WD MyCloudPR4100 24TB (w/ Raid 5) NAS. Unfortunately, the 4TB Passports seem to have a write rate problem. I use a Robocopy batch file with 8 threads running on a windows 10 pro (i5 with 16GB RAM) desktop to back up the MyCloud. I am using a USB3 interface. Backup starts just fine and for the first 2TB, write rates are 80-100 MB/s with an average response time of ~1500 ms. After that, write rates fall precipitously and ultimately drop to 2-3 MB/s with an average response time of 4500-5500 ms by the time the drive has 2.5 TB transferred. After that, the write rate seems to be stuck at a low rate. Disk shows mostly 100% active time. Things I have tried: 1. Quick format the drive: Write rate remains stuck at 2-3 MB/s 2. Full drive format (takes 12 hours): Write rate is again good for the first 2TB. 3. Halt backup script and just let the drive stay powered up for 8 hours: Partial write rate recovery for a very short time. 4. Switching to performance write (enables cache): no effect as compared to cache disabled. 5. Checking fragmentation: windows says the drive is not fragmented. 6. Altering the back up script to write large files first (PLEX .mkv .mp4 mp3) and then the user files: No difference from writing small user files first. 7. Disable password protection: no difference. 8. Backup directly on the MyCloudPR4100 by defining a backup plan on the MyCloud: still degraded write rate. 9. Used a powered USB3 Hub in case the drive was getting power starved: no difference 10. Disable Anti-virus SW: no difference 11. Run CHKDSK: no errors found 12. Change default allocation unit to from 4k to 32k: No difference There is no way to disable windows write caching on the WD Passport. I have already returned one drive to Amazon, but the replacement drive has the same characteristics. In fact, all of my 4TB drives have the same issue. It is interesting to note that I have a 3.5 inch 3T WD MyBook and a 3.5 inch 3TB Seagate Backup Plus both with external power and usb3 and neither seem to have the problem. Since write rate does not reset to near 100MB/s unless a full format is done on the drive (quick format does not help at all), and the problem has duplicated itself on 5 of 5 drives that I purchased, I suspect there is something fundamentally wrong with the 4TB Drive. WD, Fix your drives! March 11, 2018 I edited this review on Feb 26, 2018, but the update was not posted. I have reposted my update. UPDATE Feb 26, 2018 I have completed a much further examination of the 5 4TB Passport Drive I still have. WD suggested using their disk tools to validate the drives are good. All 5 drives passed all tests when using the WD Data Lifeguard tool. When I attempted to erase the drives with the tool, the erase failed. I then used the WD drive utilities to rerun diagnostics (all passed) and then the tool was used to erase the drives. From the messages that pop up on WD, it appears that the erase/wipe tool deletes the partition and then creates and formats a new partition. After using the WD drive utilities to wipe the drives, I reran my drive performance check which was composed of transferring 2.7 TB (185k files)from my MyCloudPR4100 via my 1Gb/s LAN to a Dell Latitude 3470 laptop with the drive plugged into a USB 3 input. The transfer was done using a .bat robocopy with 16 threads and no directory or file listing. Files were mkv, mp3, and misc (mostly jpg). The laptop had no other activity running. The WD MyCloudPR4100 was connected to a Netgear ProSAFE GS108 gigabit switch which was also connected to the Dell Latitude 3470. Drives were set to use the default profile (safe removal, no caching) and indexing of file contents was disabled. The windows performance monitor was used to log the write performance of the drive each minute. All 5 drives were tested and the results are summarized in the attached .jpg. Initially, write performance on the mkv files was approximately 70GB/s and degraded slowly as seen in the attached graphic. mp3 and jpg write performance was approximately 43 MB/s. As a further test, I erased the 522GB of the "mostly jpg" workload and then proceeded to write 924GB of mp4 files to the drive. Write performance was 27-34 MB/s. I should note, the MyCloudPR4100 is used as a Plex server and is also used as DVR storage and backup for PCs on the network, so some occasional performance degradations could be attributed to other network or server traffic. So in conclusion, I have upgraded my rating from a 1 to a 4. WD did not get the 5 rating because of my out of the box experience noted above on all 5 drives. The is no reason I should need to use the WD tools prior to using each drive. They should work well from the factory.

Update … after researching on the web, I found an article that indicated one possible option was that the drive security permissions needed to be changed. I went in & found (after 2 tries), that was in fact the problem. So I've changed my rating from a 1 star to 5. I've used WD quite a bit in the past, so to lose a drive that fast was very discouraging. I would suggest that WD should have been more proactive in sending tips with the drive … as it turns out, I had the same problem a few days later with another WD drive. It would have saved me some time & aggravation. However, to be fair with the vendor, once I got the permissions issue corrected, both drives seem to now work. And while I didn't realize it until I came back online to update this review, the vendor did respond to my "blast" with some helpful suggestions & an invitation to call support. Wish that had been in the box with the drive. So I'm now changing my rating to a 5 star partially because I feel I blasted WD pretty hard for a fixable problem & partly because I've had several of their drives in the past that were stable. Less than a week after loading all my files on the drive, I started getting an error message that states "there is a problem with this drive" immediately upon plugging the drive into the USB port. When I tried to access the drive directly via file explorer, I get a message that "Location not available" "drive is not accessible" "access is denied". I also tried plugging it in while the PC was shut down & then powering up … same error message. Finally, I tried to utilize the WD utilities to trouble shoot & got a message that "smart status passed" … also scanned drive & got a message "Passed at Thursday June 14, 2018 8:07:31 PM". Then went back & tried to access the drive, I again get a message that "Location not available" "drive is not accessible" "access is denied". Now all my personal data is on the drive & I can't delete it, so there's no way I can't safely return the drive to get a refund or replacement. What a waste of time & money. It's too bad because I've used Western Digital drives over the years & only switched because I needed more space. But this experience is so frustrating, that this will be the last WD drive I purchase. I can't afford to throw money away like that after less than a week of use. Looks like my only option is to pursue online back-ups vs. what I hoped was a less expensive option.

My computer is my 'confuser'... I am not computer smart. My problem is that I was out of hard drive space but love my laptop and didn't want a new one so after reading the reviews of this portable drive, I decided to try it. It self installed, all I did was plug it in. I honestly didn't have to do anything else-just plug into my USB port. Then I looked at my computer storage space- it showed my full hard drive and it showed this portable drive (having 3.69 TB... I'm guessing some space is lost in installation??) So I took a piece of black duct tape and literally taped it to the cover of my laptop (I do not care what it looks like...besides, it's small and black and matches anyway.) NOW whenever I want to download camera photos or anything else, I easily choose to download to that drive and it's there. It's like having a new computer with free hard drive space. I'm so glad someone else made a post about wanting one of these drives for the exact same reason as I needed it for. Because it has saved me from buying a whole new computer and it's simple to use. Since I didn't have to buy a new computer, I did buy the $10 optional data recovery plan- I figure cheap insurance should something go wrong.

A few weeks ago, I clicked on an ad displayed in YouTube and got an error message that the web site attached to the ad was a malicious site. Even though my anti-virus app saved my bacon that time, I got the message that my growing concern over ransomware was legitimate. So, I thought a good way to protect my data would be to back up everything on my computer to an external drive. I shopped around for a reliable, affordable, portable drive and after analysis, chose the WD 4TB Passport. It has a single USB port for power source and data transfer and it's only 4 x 3 x 3/4 inches. I can keep the drive offsite, in the car, or simply on the top of my desktop, and every few days or weekly I can simply plug it in and back up every new or changed file. It drive comes with backup software, but I like SyncToy, a free app. If I somehow accidentally get hit by ransomware, I can reformat the PC drive and copy everything back from my Passport. Would you rather spend $100 now or $6,000 to the ransomware extortionists--who may not tell you how to unlock your data even after you paid? Recommended.