WD 20TB Elements Desktop External Hard Drive - USB 3.0, Black

Product Information

Most such multi-bay devices are sold without the actual hard drives included, so you can install any drive you want (usually, 3.5-inch drives, but some support laptop-style 2.5-inchers). Their total storage capacities are limited only by their number of available bays and the capacities of the drives you put in them. The storage industry refers to these (as well as smaller-capacity externals as a whole) as DAS—for "direct attached storage"—to distinguish them from NAS, or network attached storage, many of which are also multi-bay devices that can take two or more drives that you supply. (See our separate roundup of the best NAS drives.) Also know that you can find external drives that do way more than just store your data. Some include SD card readers to offload footage from a camera or drone in the field, while a few specialized models have built-in Wi-Fi and can double as a little media server, able to connect to more than one device at a time. The only case with hard drives where the USB standard matters much is if you connect a drive to an old-style, low-bandwidth USB 2.0 port, which is better reserved for items like keyboards and mice. (Also, if it's a portable drive, that USB 2.0 port may not supply sufficient power to run the drive in the first place, so the speed shortfall may be moot.) Any remotely recent computer will have some faster USB 3-class ports, though.

You can allow windows to turn off the drive when it's not in use too if you find the right USB Mass Storage Device in Device Manager. That will stop the noise when it's not in use but obviously it needs to spin up again when you want to use it. The noise the large drives make when spinning up is also quite loud and grindy. When your internal hard drive is almost full your PC slows down. Don’t delete files. Free up space on your internal hard drive by transferring files to your WD Elements portable hard drive and get your laptop moving again. The compact design offers up to 22TB capacity, making WD Elements desktop storage the ideal solution for easy, add-on storage of all your important photos, music, videos and files. Solid-state drives (SSDs) have fewer moving parts than traditional hard drives, and they offer the speediest access to your data. Unlike a conventional disk-based hard drive, which stores data on a spinning platter or platters accessed by a moving magnetic head, an SSD uses a collection of flash cells—similar to the ones that make up a computer's RAM—to save data. The sleek design offers up to 20TB capacity, making WD Elements HDD desktop storage the ideal solution for easy, add-on storage of all your important photos, music, videos, and files.

Customer reviews

That said, as a platter-based hard drive, it's best equipped to store a game library; you're better off loading the games you're currently playing from an SSD. If you conservatively figure an average game size of 100GB, the 4TB version tested here can hold about 40 titles, serving as the stylish main repository of your collection for years to come, and for a much more modest outlay than you'd spend on an SSD of similar capacity. Who It's For This change of mind return policy is in addition to, and does not affect your rights under the Australian Consumer Law including any rights you may have in respect of faulty items.

You'll only see the speed benefits of Thunderbolt, however, if you have a drive that's SSD-based, or a multi-drive, platter-based desktop DAS that is set up in a RAID array. For ordinary external hard drives, Thunderbolt is very much the exception, not the rule. It tends to show up mainly in products geared toward the Mac market. Perhaps the only thing you don't need to pay all that much attention to is the warranty. Sounds counter-intuitive, perhaps? Sure, a long warranty is nice. But if your drive breaks because you dropped it, the warranty likely won't cover that, anyway. Even if the drive fails because of a manufacturing defect, most warranties simply replace the drive and don't cover the cost of recovery services that attempt to rescue your data from the broken drive. The real value lies in what's on your drive, not the drive itself.Hard drives may get you more capacity for your dollar by far, but first you need to consider a major difference in external storage these days: the hard drive versus the SSD. When your internal hard drive is almost full, your PC slows down. Don't delete files - free up space on your internal hard drive by transferring files to your WD Elements HDD desktop storage and get your computer moving again. STORE MORE OF WHAT's IMPORTANT. With capacities up to 20TB, the WD Elements desktop hard disk drive helps you store more photos, videos, music, and files