WD 3TB My Book Desktop External Hard Drive - USB 3.0 - WDBFJK0030HBK-EESN

Good price; does the job. Quiet & fast.For Mac users: I use Carbon Copy Cloner for backup because of the serious bug with Time Machine, that Apple have been unable to fix in the last three OS releases. CCC is better than Time Machine in a number of ways (not least that it doesn't have that bug, so it doesn't stop backing up part of your system without telling you): for instance access to the backed up files being more straight-forward (so restoring a previous version is easier) - the CCC external drive simply shows as a device with all your files listed identically to your internal drive (plus earlier versions in an archive).But best of all: it allows the Mac to boot from the external hard drive used for CCC, so if your internal hard drive fails, just boot from the external drive and you are up & running with all your applications, files etc. If the Mac is so broken that it won't boot from an external drive, just connect it to any other Mac and boot from it. A superb feature.The problem is that some external hard drives do not allow booting from them, including early WD drives. Western Digital themselves will not confirm which drives support booting, but I can confirm that this drive definitely does. So if you are a Mac user, go for it.

At last a hard drive big enough to be confident of having additional storage for the foreseeable future. The box arrived, I unpacked it and low and behold I was presented with a well made hard drive case with a 3 tb hard drive ready fitted and all the instructions needed to set up the system. Immediately my laptop reported that it had a new hard drive connected and ready to go. I have waited for a while before giving this review to feel confident about what I would say, and I can now confidently say that my first impressions are backing up my experience. Top marks and 5 stars all round. In a nutshell, well made, seamless integration and the drive now just sits there doing its job, no glitches, no hiccups, no drama. Thanks to My Book for an excellent addition to my system and thanks amazon for a great service with an affordable price.

Purchased this - arrived - plugged in and worked fine. Once I had loaded 90% of my data on it disappeared from "My Computer" and would not open. I tried rebooting it and my computer - no good. So I tried different USB3 sockets - no good - Then I got it to reconnect in a USB2 socket. Only by chance did I notice that when I touched the USB lead it randomly connected and disconnected. I took a close look at the supplied USB plug and saw that the blue sleeve inside the plug was only about two thirds the thickness of all the other usb leads I had around. Consequently the pins inside were not held firmly against the pins in the socket - in other words it was loose and wobbling around. So I gingerly put the supplied plug in a vice and tweaked it to narrow the plug. This then pushed into the sockets with the same friction that all other USB plugs do. The supplied plug is shoddy and not up to spec. In case any reader thinks its my computer that has worn USB sockets I can assure you all I have had it years and no other device has had this loose plug supplied. Very frustrating - it was just luck I found the problem. During the problem I also spent an hour trying to leave a email on the Western Digital web site. Very tortuous experience. Eventually I succeeded and received an auto reply that they would get back to me in 24 hours - not heard a thing.

I'm sure that this very large capacity external hard drive will prove to be superb and reliable at holding many thousands of my RAW photos taken on my 24mb DSLR - but setting up it up proved to be a real problem.This, I'm sure, was down to my own PC set up and won't apply to most, especially if it's your first external hard drive.Having several other external drives, of lesser capacity, already running, my PC wouldn't set up, or show that even the WD was connected. No light on, no sound, no faint vibration that the unit was operating. Usually, such are 'Plug in and Play', as have been my couple of large Seagates and are a doddle to set up and start using immediately. In the end, I contacted Amazon to say that I was returning it as a dud.In a final desperate attempt, I unplugged all my other USB devices - and then, reconnecting the WD on its own and lo and behold, it opened up and worked perfectly - and has now done so silently and faultlessly for the month since. It seems to like to think that it is the only and default hard drive and like a cuckoo likes to muscle other, smaller ones out! Or so, it seemed to me. I had to add the other drives later.Six TB is a really big space to fill, of course and the extra 1TB costs quite a lot more proportionally than the 5TB Seagate I also had running. They've been fine too and I can recommend them. The unit looks good too.My 4 stars is because I did experience worrying set up problems, which as I say, probably won't apply to most. And it is quite expensive, capacity wise, over the now-standard 4 or 5TB units. But WD do have a good reputation and the huge capacity makes it a long term investment, but as always, I do have the data on it backed up also on the smaller drives. There is no such thing as a failure proof drive and it's always wise to back up elsewhere but thankfully it seems that the vast majority of them are now very reliable - just never move them when they are running!