WD 44TB My Book Duo Desktop RAID External Hard Drive HDD, USB 3.1, With Password Protection and Auto Backup Software - WDBFBE0440JBK-NESN

I had been put off WD drives since my old (WD Elements desktop drive) had just one day (in 2014 sometime after about an year or so of reliable usage) become dead without any known reason (no physical damage ever, never moved from desktop) and I hadn't been able to recover any of my 3tb data (years of work). This experience obviously caused me an aversion for WD drives but I learnt to always have a total backup of my main drive/data and for the last 4 or so years I have been using a 10tb Seagate (desktop hub) with 02 5tb desktop Seagates as the total backups. Evidently I do my backups manually (it's not rocket science requiring clunky software, rather a sequential style drag/drop/copy/paste task) and while it is admittedly a mundane and repetitive exercise the minor PTSD like experience from my first WD experience mentioned in the first sentence will not allow me to rely on anything else to ensure data storage safety (my data isn't secret or even valuable, just digital memories, movies, tv shows and pc games/software etc...but important to me because I like to be a library of sorts where I dislike deleting things to free up space because offline data access is always a good thing if ever faced with connectivity issues). Am not a techie but I appreciate data safety and after about 7 or 8 weeks of research (online duh..que Billie's bad guy) I decided to part ways with some of my hard earned savings and dive back into the promises by Western Digital. It's not cheap (I live in beautiful Fiji) to buy things on Amazon as shipping/import costs add on to the overall purchase price (while our FJ dollar is relatively an underdog vis-a-vis the US dollar) so took the plunge (despite my earlier 10tb Seagate first arriving DOA, costing my an extra FJ$200 to ship it back for a "free" replacement...not free to the consumer but Seagate is worth it IMHO). This one cost me US$905.83 (so you can understand that in FJ$ it translates to FJ$1,830 or thereabouts, but under FJ$2K factoring in credit card charges as well). No am not rich, but needed another drive as my 10tb main has about 700gb free space left (since I don't delete anything). First of all, delivery and packaging - very nice (vocalize like Borat but am sincere). Amazon had those air space bags in the outer box so that was nice and the DHL service is very nice and reliable so got this drive today (2 weeks earlier than expected). Then the big test...was it DOA...nope, works well and straight out of the box as it should and drive passed the WD diagnostic tests (using the RAID 0 default). Contains 02 10tb WD Red drives which are nice. Casing is relatively okay, plastic but should be fine (it is a desktop drive after all and will remain on the desktop). Usable space is 18.1 TB (this is expected/normal for anyone who knows basic computing). Cables are nice with USB C to USB 3 and USB C to USB C with power adapter and cable. Have transferred about 100gb of data to the WD MyBook Duo from my 10tb Seagate and speeds, while not consistent (given large volumes of small files pdf, doc, ppt, xls etc) are relatively fast (using USB C to USB C but obviously other/host drive is USB 3). The MyBook Duo runs relatively quietly (no audible irritation) and there are obvious decibel increases when the drive is under stress but this is not an issue if you understand how mechanical hard drives work. While this review is arguably premature I am happy with my purchase for now and I have placed my trust in WD products again because my research shows that while its products may face issues at times, it appears WD cares about the consumers. I remain on my guard however because now my main 10tb, together with my 02 05tb Seagates (total 20tb) will be the data backup of this 20tb WD. Would I buy this again? That depends on how well this one lasts (and honestly, it should last my remaining lifetime given my usage habits but lets see, if it doesn't last, nope if it does, yes, because I don't delete anything and more storage is often a need for me). So for this product, for now, 03 out of 03 for the product itself and 02 out of 02 for the Amazon service and DHL delivery. Vinaka from Fiji.

I have to give this drive mad props. I've been a My Book fanatic for years. I have rarely if ever had a serious issue with any WD drive in almost 30 years. I just keep buying bigger and bigger ones and they just keep going. I buy new drives and back up everything from the older drives to the newer drives as they continue to get huger and huger in capacity, and as I record and capture more and more data. These My Book and Elements drives have been phenomenally reliable. I have the RAID pair versions, too. Love 'em all! So I'm pretty multiple-backed-up.But here's what I have to tell you about this one... I was house-sitting for a good friend over the 4'd o' Jeely holiday this year. They have an old Weimaraner whose getting up in years, so she's not much trouble, but last Christmas they got a new maltipoo who is CONSTANTLY all over that poor old dog with her ridiculous puppy energy! As usual, I set up my headquarters with my work laptop (much newer and way more powerful than my home laptop) at their dining room table with the power cables for both the computer and the hard drive running over to the wall. It's never been a problem before.Early on in the week, I had an inkling that I might not want to have the power cables hanging off the table like that this time, but I didn't do anything about it right away. Well, the next day in the early evening, I was standing near the table. There was a sudden rustling and the dogs tore between the table and the wall, and I heard a loud, reverberant CRAAAASH!!!! It took a couple seconds for the sound to completely die away in their large, open house. I immediately knew what it was. Sure enough, as I looked at the hardwood floor, it was indeed my hard drive that had slammed against it. I was so P.OOOOOOO.d!! I've had the drive since February, and there was almost 6 Terabytes of data on it, which, as you probably know, represents a significant time investment just in getting that data on there, to say nothing of what was involved in actually collecting and producing said data! But as it is an external USB drive, I knew it was spun down since I hadn't been at the computer for a while, and I fully expected the drive to be functional when I plugged it in. I've dropped drives before. Especially inside a plastic case, not spinning, they can take a VERY HARD drop and still work flawlessly for years. I've done it before.Well, imagine my horror when I didn't even get a drive letter when I plugged it back in! This detail becomes important later. It spun up and made its little chipmunk noises and sounded normal, but it made somewhat of a funny short squeal whenever I torqued it a bit, so I thought some severe damage must have occurred! My heart sank a bit, but I wasn't TOO mortified, because I still had this drive's primary at home. This drive was used as a backup, and it's also the one I take out in the world when I want to have my personal data with me, wrapped securely inside my clothes in a suitcase, or in the backpack I wear as a kind of digital Go Bag that I take to work every day. It was nearing 11 p.m. as I somewhat nervously made my way home about 15 minutes away to pick up the primary. I started thinking about what could go wrong. I could have a car accident. ANYTHING. This pair of drives basically contains the last two years of everything I've recorded (I'm a sound guy and I play the sitar live, sing in my church choir and basically record my entire life, as well as events of friends and others, LITERALLY almost 24/7), all my photos (I'm a photographer and take thousands of photos per month), a videographer, with hours of footage casually captured, and sometimes not-so-casually, and many other collections of data from all over my life.I am a VERY data-intensive person and have been for most of my sentient existence. I'm also a programmer. I've been backing up for a few decades. I have a suitcase full of old hard drives that must weigh at least 100 pounds. Yeah, I don't have a third geographic redundancy for all my data, and I'd be pretty screwed if my house burned down, but hey... I am easily WAY more backed up than 99.999% of people in the world. So as I came home to get the main drive, my biggest worry was just getting it backed up again before something else could happen. I decided to do the backup, using the work laptop, to a new 8 TB My Book drive, which I had already had one-hour rushed to me at my friend's house via Amazon PrimeNow. (I LOVE that service!!!!) This is because the work laptop has USB 3 ports and the copy would go MUCH faster than on my home laptop, the venerable old Qosmio that I've had since 2010. Yep... it's still going strong and I still love it. But sadly, it only has USB 2 ports (until I recently added a PCMCIA USB 3 adapter which you can read about in another of my reviews... yes, I said PCMCIA!!!).I got home and picked up the 6 TB (ALSO WD My Book) hard drive for which the 8 TB drive was the backup. Here's where I will shamefully admit that I have a LOT of stuff on that drive that I never even copied over to the new 8 TB drive, just because I never did, I guess out of sheer laziness. Even when you're slightly paranoid like me, you can get complacent when things just work and work and work for years. So I was a little nervous about all this. I toyed around in my mind with thoughts like "What if I plug it in and it just doesn't work?". NAAAAAAAH! What are the odds? I was just using it the day before. And I've even used it on that work laptop before. Everything's going to be fine!Well, wouldn't you know... I got back to the friend's house with that drive and plugged it into the laptop, and a popup dialog came up with some weird drive letter saying it needed to be formatted to be used!!!!! I almost lost it!!! I brought up the Disk Management app and it looked like it had 3 RAW partitions on it instead of the single 6 TB properly-formatted one that should have been there! Something somewhere had gone VERY wrong!!! To this day, I don't know what happened to that drive. I started asking myself why I didn't simply do the smart thing and fire it up at home and just do the backup there, slowly and safely. But I knew I was stuck at this remote location for a week and would want to babysit the whole process, so that's what drove my decision.This may sound ridiculous to most people, but this situation threw me into a serious existential dilemma. I have spent my entire life capturing recordings of sound, video, photography, EVERYTHING. I'm 51 now. I've been at it for decades. I was facing the possibility of just having lost all my recordings of my church choir for the past two years... all my live sitar performances... two years of amazing photographs from all aspects of my life and places I've been and experiences I've had and people I know and those whom I have randomly met and photographed. Two years of that 24/7 recording of my life I mentioned before. Yes, I literally carry a Sony stereo sound recorder with me everywhere I go and it records my entire life!In that space and time, I started questioning what was the point of my entire life if it was this easy to lose so much data that I had spent so much time and effort capturing and preserving and supposedly backing up.I am fortunate in that I have lived as a somewhat social hermit for most of my life. Even when I was married for seven years (1995-2002), people accused us of just being TWO hermits living together. I like to be alone. There's only so much of being around other people that I can take before I have to retreat back to my fortress of solitude. But that can be very lonely, too. And that's why I love capturing life in so many ways, because I am alone enough that I am amazed to see people and nature and life and the world around me. I feel compelled to record it. Then I can study it and re-live it in microscopic detail when I am alone... a kind of detail that most people don't even know exists. In the past few years, I have returned to a life with faithful Believers around me, after 35 years of having walked away from my faith in God and Christ.Jim, the husband of my church choir director, is a data recovery specialist. (Holy Spirit at work here, right?) I called him and told him my dilemma. I drove the new 8 TB drive and the 6 TB drive over to him. I talked to him and his wife, my great brother and sister, about what if I don't get this data back? I've been having crazy thoughts about why I even do all this? Should I go off and become a monk? Should I pour myself into the sitar and just forget about recording things ever again? Should I call up the girl I've been madly in love with for over two years, who is unable to even fathom a desire for an intimate relationship (think of a female version of Sheldon Cooper from Big Bang Theory) and just propose to her? Did I even want to continue to live??? I was in a crazy kind of way!!!!So Jim tells me not to worry and that he'd look at it. Sometime the next day, he was able to call me up and tell me that all the data was still there, and that he was copying it to the new drive. Incidentally, he only has USB 2 ports on his recovery machine, so it was a several day process!!!! I razzed him about that a bit. But you know... he got all the data off that drive and onto the new one... the new WD My Book 8 TB drive, the PrimeNow page of which I think I'll also post this review to so it will be backed up!! :-)He couldn't figure out why he wasn't able to fix the partition table, even though his software recognized it as a single NTFS partition and was able to fully recover the data without any hiccups. It's still sitting on the floor of my room here. I don't dare reformat it and recopy the data to it until I have fully backed up the data from the new 8 TB drive to yet another drive. (Yes, here I am weeks later and I am just now starting that process! Hence I still have the 6 TB acting as a KIND of backup for now.)So, I mentioned backing this stuff up to yet another drive. "And what drive might that be?" you ask. Why, the OTHER 8 TB WD My Book drive that got slammed on the floor! That's the reason for this huge 5-star review. Remember I mentioned that when I plugged it in I didn't even get a drive letter? That really struck me as strange, because the drive letter usually still shows up, even if the drive is completely trashed. It will simply give you a bunch of errors and data failures when you try to access it. It really seemed more like an interface issue than a hard drive issue. Having nothing better to do while I waited for my data to come back, I had disassembled the 8 TB drive from its plastic case, thinking maybe there was some issue with the circuit board that connects the drive and its SATA interface to the outside world with a USB interface. I disconnected the little board and re-seated it to the drive and jiggled the plug in the connector, all to no avail. The drive still didn't come up on the computer.So several days later, the day I was done house-sitting, Jim announced the copy was finished. I picked up the drives. When I finally got home, I plugged the new 8 TB into my laptop and it came up and there was all my data, as promised. What a relief! Next, I took the dropped drive completely out of its enclosure, still not convinced that it was dead. I mean, even the brand new 8 TB drive that I had just bought made that funny little squeal when I torqued it a little bit while it was spinning, so it was a completely normal sound!When you own a ton of drives like I do, you have a lot of bare ones that came out of tower computers, or even some that were taken out of external drive enclosures. They are much easier to manage that way, and take up a lot less space. But you have to have a way to access them, and one way via a hard drive bay. That's a device that lets you plug a bare hard drive into a slot and it interfaces to your computer via USB or maybe eSATA. Well, I halfheartedly plugged the drive into the bay and turned it on, and what do you know... good old Drive P: came right up on the computer as if nothing had ever happened! It's still going like gangbusters. 5-stars, my friend! I lost NOTHING during this calamity. Yeah, I have to admit, I even had a bunch of stuff on this drive that wasn't backed up anywhere else, too. But I consider a lot of that to be expendable because it's more of a time investment than a life investment. It's stuff that can be retrieved again from elsewhere.The moral of this story is this... and I know this full well, of course, as do a great many of you... BUT... ONE BACKUP of important data is NEVER enough! Think about it. If you lose your backup, or your primary for that matter, then you are down to ONE COPY. And if something... ANYTHING... goes wrong with that... you are in the same boat as all those people you have shaken your head about over the years who didn't even bother to have ONE backup and lost everything.The only real backup is AT LEAST TWO backups, and one of those is tucked away in a safe, remote location. That way, your house can burn down and you still don't lose anything, except for the stuff you created since you last updated your remote backup, which you have to do from time to time, of course, preferably not in the presence of the third drive, since you don't want all three of them to be together at the same time. You never knew when disaster will strike, right? Look what almost happened to me!!!This is just a silly review of a hard drive on Amazon, but these drives contain years' worth of the very product of my life. And I am here to tell you that I trust them and I count on them and they have not let me down, even when under extreme duress.What more do you need to know?A quick postscript here... before I went to get my drives back, Jim had asked me to grab some dinner for three at a local Italian restaurant as payment for this service (he usually charges people $500 for this kind of recovery!). His wife had had a foot surgery recently and they were depending on friends to bring them meals for a time. When I got there, they had set up their formal dining room with their best china and a bottle of white wine. We ate like royalty that evening. That's the power of friends and the power of faith!

Obviously the price is what it is and there is nothing I can say about that except it is proportional to the amount of storage but I understand that the price is not in the realm of your average everyday purchase. Having said that it formats in 30 seconds to give you 14.5tb of space. If you are a collector and have over 1800 games and are also looking forward to the new system coming at the end of 2020 (I think) then you have everything you need in this drive. The 20tb drive from this company does NOT work or is not compatible with the xbox one as after 10 hours straight it would not format. 30 seconds is all it took to give me all the space I need and I can buy a second 16tb drive (you can only have 2 external drives for the xbox one) which would cover me for a decade to come in my opinion. I can’t say enough about the quality, speed, and operation about this drive as it works as well for me as the internal drive.As for use with a computer, the drive is obviously compatible and would do the same job as it would with the xbox one and with a computer the 20tb drive WOULD work. I highly recommend the 16tb drive for use with the xbox one and/or computers as I know money is tight and when you spend this type of money you want to make sure you get the right type of value associated with spending this money. My opinion is definitely yes! I hope this helps some people when deciding about purchasing an external hard drive especially for xbox one owners as I did not have much research to go on and that is why I had to return the 20tb hard drive and learned the hard way and shelling out even more money that it was incompatible. Good luck and I hope this 16tb Western Digital drive solves your needs as it has done for me.