WD Elements SE

50% Failure Rate! – Over a period of about 5 years, I have purchased 4 x 1TB WD Elements external hard drives for backups. I was motivated by the competitive price and the availability at OfficeWorks, and the fact that Western Digital was once a respected brand. Two of my WD Elements have failed. My misfortune with WD Elements external HDDs is a 50% failure rate, which equates to about $150 flushed down the S-bend so far, not to mention the lost data. And I am not confident for the remaining two. I have also purchased Seagate and Toshiba USB external HDDs and they haven't failed (yet).

My experience with WD portable USB powered HDDs has been an unhappy one and I will never purchase another one again if a different brand is available.

Best yet – This is a very small Hard Drive with 2TB info, I've been using it for over a year now and never had a problem; it's really fast and doesn't take up much room so is easy to carry and store.

Terrible! Drive corrupted less than 6 months in – Have used this drive for documents and live stream video files. Always slow. Fragments videos to barely watchable rates. 6 months in drive corrupted all files lost. 0/10 not recommended

The wd virus – Nothing is executing from the drives I keep getting a message saying I don't have rights but its default all launcher well for the ones that work have to be executed as admin to run games I go to there web site to get help and mandatory information that they need can not be aceesed wen the drives are on, I have a Seagate of same size and same config everything works this is not the first product from wd that I have had issue with to say truth there is not one product that I have purchased that isn't inferiors to requirements

'Back-up' that really gets your back up!! – Many reviews for hard drives are written in the relatively short term. When you're buying a hard drive for back-up/archiving you're looking, quite reasonably, at an expectation of many years of safe and secure file and data storage. We were sold two WD Elements for the business, to back-up up tax files, administrative data and critical records – each from two of the company's Macs. The first one died about three years into operation. Visible on Disk Utility but could not be re-mounted. It was taken to a tech but nothing could be salvaged off the drive. The second one died this week. Simply dropped off the desktop and can't be recognised! Invisible to Disk Utility! 'Pilot' light doesn't come on. It's cactus! Again with a lot of files critical to the business! We're not expecting to salvage our files, although we'll try. Lots of legal ramifications if they're gone for good. Still dealing with the fall-out from the first failure!

Now some smarties will say "You should've backed it up?" Well what is an external hard drive for? How long a daisy-chain of back-up devices do you have to create to securely and safely (and permanently) store data.

When the first SE 1TB we replaced it with a My Book (also WD). WD seem to have got this one right. It's still going…but I'm tempted to buy another external HD to back-up THAT back-up. Just in case.