Another fantastic storage solution coming from Western Digital (WD). We recently bought into a number of these WD Elements 8TB External USB 3.0 HDD’s for various benchmarks and storage opportunities. We go through a LOT of video content around here, and most everything has made the move toward 4K, which only makes that worse. So our storage needs continue to grow. These drives thus far have proven to be a major win for us when it comes to capacity.
The design of the Elements drives is nearly identical to many of WD’s external models in the past, including their MyBook series. A typically rectangular enclosure with a rounded front, with your connections in the back. The enclosures are of course all plastic and black in color.
The back side of the drive contains your usual USB 3.0 micro-B plug found on many USB 3.0 external models. It comes with the cable that adapts to your normal USB-A on the other end, ready to plug into any computer. You also have your DC input for the power cable it comes with. There is a power button so that you can manually power the drive down before disconnecting, and you also get a Kensington-style lock hole so that you can secure the drive to a surface (to keep it from walking away if you plan to use it openly around many others).
Like any HDD, they aren’t as fast as you’d get with SSD transfer speeds, but sadly you just can’t get your hands on any SSD solution with 8TB at this price. So speeds will have to wait for now, in exchange for tons and tons of storage all over.
We get anywhere between 150-176MB/s (average) write speeds when backing data (large files) to these drives, making them just fine for backups. Sometimes we see small spikes that can climb a little higher (as you can see in the above image), but generally, they stay within the average.
These also make great network storage solutions, for sharing data between systems across your network (both home and work). Of course, we still prefer RAID solutions where you have the information mirrored across drives, but if RAID isn’t your thing, this drive very well might just be the answer! It is user-friendly, has tons of space, and gets the job done just fine.
Our Conclusion
Another wonderful solution from Western Digital, offering your average high speeds for a spinning external disk, and the kind of capacity that will cure your nerves for a long time (hopefully). The only thing that will render these drives obsolete is the growing trend of larger capacity video games–and even with that, you should still get a lot of life out of one of these.
| Buy from Amazon | Buy from Best Buy | |
Our Rating | Average Price* $139.99 |
*Average price is based on the time this article was published
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