WD 4TB My Book Desktop External Hard Drive - USB 3.0 - WDBFJK0040HBK-NESN,Black

I bought this specifically to use it as an external storage option for my Xbox One, which was down to less than 10% available when they released the update that allowed external storage in early June 2014. If you are considering this drive as an external drive for your Xbox One system, I can assure you it handles the task quite nicely! When I plugged the drive into an available USB 3.0 slot on the back of the Xbox One, the Xbox One immediately recognized it as an external storage device, and asked if I would like to format the drive. Formatting was very straight forward and very quick. The Xbox One OS also gives you the opportunity to name the drive, which I kept at the default "External" so you can tell internal storage from external storage. Another nice feature is that the Xbox One gives you the option to always install new content to the external drive until it is full. If you select this option, then anything that is installed from this point forward will be installed to the external drive, as long as it is connected. It's a great drive, very quiet, very quick, and I have no issues playing games off of it rather than the internal drive. Again, if you are considering this for an external storage option for your Xbox One, do it!

I purchased this drive largely based upon a specific need for a USB 3.0 product with 4TB of storage. I've owned many WD internal and external HD products over time and have not had any drive failures to date over many years. I purchased this drive specifically as a backup storage drive attached to a Synology 1813+ NAS unit. This required a reformat to EXT4 as the drive comes natively formated in NTFS. The Synology NAS schedules backup to this drive of selected folder shares using the "Time Backup" software available from Synology. I'm not utilizing any of the software included from WD with this drive (backup, cloud, etc.) as the Synology NAS has its own software for each of these purposes.The drive itself is similar in size to other My Book drives. The plastic casing is certainly not as nice as the aluminum finish on the WD My Book drives that I have for my Macs, but it is similar to the black of the Synology unit and overall looks good. The power adapter is reasonably sized (not a brick), and the unit comes with a USB 3.0 cord for use with its single USB 3.0/2.0 port. WD provides a 2-year warranty with this product.There are cheaper drives with similar specs available from other companies. However, having had drive failures with Seagate over the years, I'm unwilling to take chances with other options. It's important to backup your valued files, and WD drives have played a major role in my backup solutions over time. If I have issues with this drive, I'll update my review. This seems to be another winner from WD!Edit/Addendum:Following my review, another Amazon user asked me an excellent question, "Does the USB connection to the drive feel flimsy?" This is a very appropriate question given concerns raised with the prior generation of this same My Book device. While I don't own the previous My Book version in question, I did check the USB connector on my device. The supplied USB 3.0 cable seems to be stable in its connection to the rear port of the My Book case. I can't physically make it move horizontally or vertically with any significance - unless I were to apply excessive force. Modest attempts at movement of the USB cable did not disrupt the connection. I don't plan to move this My Book from one place to another (it's connected to my NAS), so I suppose that I won't be able to comment well on wear-and-tear issues with respect to the USB connector. Other My Book devices that I own are the Mac Firewire/USB 2.0 version. Those have never struck me as flimsy.Update 1/18/14:Since writing my original review, I've purchased a 2nd unit which I reformatted for Mac OS X and use for "time machine" backup. Both drives are functioning well and have had no issues. I'm still very pleased with the quality and function of the drives. Reading through a number of the questions regarding this drive, it's clear that the term "cloud backup" as assigned by WD to this drive is a bit of a marketing stretch. As has been noted by others, the "cloud backup" option is not intrinsic to the drive, but an add-on service provided by Dropbox and facilitated by WD software that a user may choose to run on an attached computer (I don't personally use or recommend that others use WD software). These drives are nothing more than a WD drive, in an enclosure, with a single USB 3.0 connection. If you are looking for "cloud" capability, other product options do exist. I do hope that WD changes its description of drives such as this in future marketing.

I've had good experiences with portable WD HDs before, so I picked this up mostly to save disk images of the computers in my house.This drive comes with software loaded on it for you to install: a utility to test and diagnose the drive, as well as a back up software solution; there is also a "driver" for this drive, but I'm not clear what it is suppose to accomplish since Windows recognized the My Book's full capacity without it. The utility is useful, but I didn't use the back up software -- rather I downloaded the "Acronis True Image WD Edition" software from WD's website. In fact, I installed Acronis, created a bootable Acronis disc, then uninstalled Acronis. I made an ISO copy of the bootable Acronis disc backup software. Acronis WD edition only works with WD drives attached to your computer.To test this portable drive I did a full erase filling the disc with zeroes (I used the Acronis bootable disc for this). What this accomplishes is that if there is a problem the software will tell me, and any defects will be replaced by good sectors through the SMART function of the drive. This took about a day and a half. I then tried to format the drive in Windows, I could not. Windows saw the My Book as two 2TB discs -- kind of strange. (Could a RAID 0 of two 2TB discs be inside what appears to be a single HDD?) Anyway, I zeroed the drive again using the supplied Windows WD utility and it only took a moment. That reset the drive so that it was viewed as one, blank 4TB drive in Windows. I then formatted the drive as NTFS with Windows. That took about a day and a half. So, there doesn't seem to be any defects.The drive works like regular drives, no funny business, and the drive is backward compatible with USB 2.0. This is a very solid and sturdy piece of equipment.Now, WD is known to supply back doors to the NSA. I'm suspicious by nature, but don't have delusions of grandeur so as to think the NSA actually wants to spy on me. I wonder why my firewall is telling me the WD utility is trying to call out several thousands times a day. (I have my firewall block this.) So my advice is to test the drive to your content offline if you're using the WD software and only use WD software when you're offline -- otherwise firewall block it or uninstall it. The Acronis bootable disc doesn't call home and is used offline.