WD 4TB My Book external hard drive, Desktop HDD with Password Protection, USB 3.0, SuperSpeed USB, software for device management, backup, hardware encryption, Black

Having read dozens of reviews of these WD MyBook Duo drives, the conclusion I had come to was that they are very loud, but otherwise ok. I found a 'used' one on the Amazon Warehouse at a vastly reduced price, so I was happy to give it a go for myself. I was chiefly interested in using it in RAID 1 (mirrored mode) as an expansion for my QNAP T451 NAS although I decided to also try it directly connected via USB to my Macbook. Dealing with the 'noise' issue first, I'm not sure if I've been exceptionally lucky, but other that when it first switches on (you get a brief flurry from the fan, just to prove it works) it is basically silent (other than a little bit of clicking of the HDD heads getting in the right position). There's no audible fan noise and it seems to run pretty cool. I wasn't worried about noise as it was going to live in a cupboard with my NAS, but I'm glad it's very quiet in case plans change and it moves out of it's under-stairs home. When testing via USB, it was tucked away on a bookshelf behind the sofa with a long USB3 lead and noise was not an issue. Speed is very good plugged into my Macbook. As you can see from my screenshot, in RAID 1 (mirror) mode it achieves ~100MB/s Write and ~135MB/s Read over USB 3. When plugged into my macbook, it takes a little while to be recognised, but once it is, it responds quickly and seems very solid. It comes up formatted as a single drive using the capacity of both drives with data striped across them both (RAID 0). This is a terrifying proposition (to me at least) as if one of the drives fails, you lose all the data on both. Luckily you have the opportunity to install an app (Windows or Mac, download from the WD website) that can change the formatting of the drive. You thereby have 2 alternatives: RAID 1 - only gives you half the capacity but if a drive fails, all of the data is safely on the other drive JBOD - which treats each disk like a separate drive, so if one fails, you only lose the data on that drive - data on the other is safe. The big advantage of how it comes set up is you get one nice big drive, and it works faster than either of the other 2 options. Fine for a backup as it's unlikely both your main disk and the backup would go at the same time. Whether it's worth the risk as a storage drive is up to you... The drives inside are WD Reds, which are designed for NAS use, and regarded as some of the more reliable drives you can buy, so you should get many many hours of use without any issues. One annoying thing on the Mac is that when you wake your Mac from sleep with the drive plugged in, the WD software will frequently alert you that there is a RAID error. There is no error, it's a false alarm. The best way to deal with this is to simply uninstall the WD software after you've configured the drive to your requirements. It has very few functions, aside from changing RAID modes and giving annoying alerts! You can always reinstall should you need to change the RAID mode (which will also wipe out all of your data).

I first bought one of these 13 years ago. It has been in constant daily use for that entire time. Lately, it has shown some concerning anomalies, so this one is replacing it. Even though it is an older model, reasonably slow by todays standards, this model is trusted by photographers everywhere as extremely reliable. It will power down after a few minutes of non use to complete silence and will take a few seconds to power up on activation and runs as just a whisper. It is a work-horse hard drive.

I bought this drive as the previous WD drive I use for system/data backups threw a wobbly after a power cut. Straight out of the box I connected it up and fired up the iMac backup software. After choosing this drive as the backup target the system formatted it and I ran the first backup. My backups come out at just under 2gb so this 4gb drive will have ample space for the process. It just sits thee doing it’s thing until I need to recover a file. These drives are reliable and last for a good time the last one for five years until a rogue heater dropped out our RCD and caused an issue with it. I am able to read from it so will still have nearly six months of previous backups to hand if needs be. I would recommend this drive especially at its current price point.

Purchased on 17th June 2019 for £87.49. I’ve been waiting for the right moment to add some storage to my PC so when this 6TB hard drive went on offer I went for it. I already have a 5TB Western Digital Elements external hard drive but it’s been really low on space for quite a while so it was time to get another one. The hard drive arrived well packaged with plenty of protection. It came complete with a UK power adapter and USB 3.0 cable. I love the look of this hard drive, the mixture of glossy and matte panels works really well and the rectangular design with the ridges looks very stylish. I actually prefer this design to the rounded design of my Elements hard drive. I literally plugged it in and it was good to go, it already had the latest firmware and was pre-formatted so I could see it on my PC. I ran the CrystalDiskMark v6 hard drive benchmark utility and as you can see from my pictures it scores an impressive sequential read/write score of over 190MB/s which is pretty impressive for a mechanical hard drive. The usable space on my Windows PC shows up as 5.45TB which is down to the conversion of the units and is perfectly normal and the same for all hard drives. Overall, this was a great buy at a great price and I would throughly recommend it if your looking to add some additional space to your PC.

I have Synology D216Play which had 2 x 3GB WD red hard drives (in a Raid 1 array -so 3GB storage nominally). This was getting full. I looked at upgrading these to 2 x 6GB (or larger) but the prices of WD red drives seem to ramp up a lot for anything over 5GB - and what would I do with the existing drives??? The WD Mybook Duo seemed to present a possible solution. If I got one of these then I could use this to backup my desktop (the largest consumer of space on the NAS) and use it for desktop backups. Amazon wanted £369 for a new 12 TB or £414 for a new 20TB - these contain 2 x 6TB or 2 x 10TB WD Red drives. This, you will note, is less than the cost of the corresponding two drives!!!!! Having just bought a pricey new Gigabyte laptop, my budget was very tight and an Amazon Prime Warehouse Deal of £290 for a 12TB reconditioned Duo proved irresistable. It arrived and was indistinguishable from new except that the WD product info stated that the software and manual were on disk. They were not but downloading them from WD proved no big deal. Oh yes, there was no "disk Replacement tool" - a piece of plastic from what I can make out - but a credit card proved adequate to levering the top off to get at the disks. After some initial experimentation, I decided to abandon my original plan. It seemed that taking the Duo disks and installing them in the NAS whilst taking the NAS disks and installing them in the Duo made more sense. It was a little more involved than this suggests - and very time consuming - but fairly straightforward. After a couple of days of Raid array rebuilding and ensuring all disks were thoroughly checked for bad secors etc, I had a NAS with 6TB (well, 5.86 TB usable) of Raid 1 storage and a Duo with 6TB (5.45TB usable) of Raid 0 storage. Ok, so I'm now using the NAS to backup all our household's systems (I use Macrium Reflect V7 for this as its the best backup software IMHO) and copy the Macrium images to the Duo (I've got it as a Network share). I also use cloud storage too but this is a review of the Duo so I won't decribe my paranoid backup system any further except to note that if the house burnt down I can recover from such a disaster. The Duo is quite compact and comes with a couple of alternative USB leads (USB-C to USB-C and USB-C to USB-A), PSU (UK plug adaptor included). If you were intending to just plug it in to a PC and use it as an external drive then it's all pretty straightforward stuff. I can't now recall how the disks were configured but I did have to format them. It is a very compact unit and its construction is quite nice-looking - better than the "plastic case" description might suggest. The unit makes very little noise - its much quieter than the PC fan for sure - and in Raid 0, I find disk access is quite fast. In use, on a Windows system, once its formatted, your system just treats it like any other disk and you can copy, drag and drop files etc as is usual. If you configure it as a JBOD then you end up with two disks of equal capacity. I prefer the Raid 0 configuration -it seems faster and I find it more convenient for Windows to "see" it as one disk. Whtehr Raid 1 is useful or not would depend on whther you are relying on the Duo to perform backups - in which case Raid 1 may be a sensible proposition (though bear in mind your effective storage capacity will be that of one disk). My only real criticism of the unit is that removing (and inserting) disks to and from the Duo's HD carriers is not quite as trivial a job as the manual's diagrams indicate. The screws have rubber grommets which are a real p.i.t.a to deal with. My NAS's disk carriers are a joy in comparison..........no screws. I can't believe WD are saving much with this rather silly, fiddly, arrrangement. It's not a deal breaker mind, and if you are not wanting to get at the physical disks it won't bother you at all. Overall, this is a very worthwhile purchase and reresents an absolute bargain if compared to the cost of just buying the two WD Red disks themselves.

I have ben using this for my time machine back-up for a number of years, and recently had to rely on it for a full system recovery, for which it worked well.

I bought this to backup multiple PCs in our house, the main desktop and a couple of laptops. The bundled software can be installed as many times as you like on multiple systems, and the data from each is kept separate on the backup drive. It is very easy to use and keeps multiple versions of files, not just the last one. After the first full backup, subsequent backups only include new or changed files. I was initially utterly dismayed to see that the file timestamps are not preserved on the backup drive, leading me to think that a restore of, for example, a load of photos would result in their timestamps being meaningless, but I thought this would be completely bonkers for backup software to behave like this, so I did a test restore of some files and was relieved to find that the restored versions did have their original timestamp info put back, so this information is obviously being stored somewhere in the backup, albeit not on the files themselves. You can restore files to their original location or somewhere else. All in all, a great drive with great software, and after a long period of having no backups after the online service I used was shut down, we are now safe again!

I purchased the 20TB for backups. During setup, I mistakenly used the included usb-a to usb-a cable but the included usb-c (device) to usb-a (computer) cable is the correct one. This is where a user guide would be useful (not included, but download from WD support). I thought there was a power problem, because the fan would start up then stop a few seconds later, but once it was connected to the computer, it worked fine. Once recognized, it works just like any other drive. I changed it to RAID 1 (so it's a 10TB mirror) which was very easy with the free WD Discovery program (download from WD). I also downloaded the free Drive, Security, and Backup utilities. The Discovery program (v3.2.256) also acts like a hub to these programs, which makes managing and configuring the drive very convenient. The Backup program (v1.9.6941.25593) is basic, to put it kindly, and I would not recommend it. The number of options is tiny but the major issue is that it does not let you backup system files, like from Windows directory or sub-directories. This is a big disappointment, as MyBook Duo is heavily marketed as a backup device and some Windows files like HOSTS are critical. Instead, WD offer an (old - 2016) but free basic version of 'Acronis True Image' as an additional download which you will need if you want to backup System files. This lack of quality WD Backup software for such an expensive device targeted towards maintaining backups, is a major failing. The Drive program (v2.0.0.54) lets you check the disk for errors, change RAID, sleep settings, turn on/off the LED etc. Simple and functional but I do find it slow. The Security program (v2.0.0.48) lets you put a password onto the device. This can be disabled for the machine it's setup on, so you do not have to keep entering it all the time. Overall, it's nice and quiet, and relatively quiet during backups. I've only had it a week and no problems. I'd give it 5 stars but the WD Backup software lets it down badly, which is important because I imagine this is why most people purchase this device. If you are not backing up system files, just ordinary personal files however, then you should be perfectly happy with the software. It would be nice for the USB-C port on the back to be highlighted/marked in some way also.