skeebum9

I've only had one drive fail on me in many years, and that was a Seagate drive. I have been using only Western Digital drives for past 10 years and never ever had a problem. Will continue with WD in the future!

bickfor903

I have 2 Western Digital 2TB MyBooks that are mirrors of each other and a 2TB MyPassbook that I move around a lot. The MyBooks are 6 & 7 years old, the Passbook is 3. I went through too many LaCie drives in the 1990s and early 2000s (as volume and capacities slowly increased) and every single one of them died what I thought was a sad and premature death. It taught me the necessity of redundancy.

drklrd Loc: Cincinnati Ohio

Used to use them but the last ones crapped out while taking it to the studio and had to go home to get my backup copy to turn in my work. So I went to Toshiba now.

DanielB Loc: San Diego, Ca

I've lost 2 hard drives, 1 was a WD, to failure of some sort. I will eventually have to pay to have them forensically recovered but I've had enough with hard drive failures specially since neither one was that old. I have gone to a cloud backup called Crash Plan.

drklrd Loc: Cincinnati Ohio

My failed drives upon opening the case turned out to be Seagate drives. I had copies of the drives and used to be a line tech on computers so i opened the drives to see if it was a simple problem or more involved and it was more involved so I tossed the out and replaced them with toshiba drives. I have several toshiba drives I just counted 5 and one of them is a 5 terra drive.

drklrd Loc: Cincinnati Ohio

But the cloud is very hackable please keep that in mind. An old hacker I know says so. So I believe him.

NikonEdd Loc: Spokane Valley, WA

I have 3 of them in my desktop system.
Have also used WD as internal HD when building a tower.
Never a problem.

bwana Loc: Bergen, Alberta, Canada

I have four WD 4TB and three WD 2TB external hard drives as well as a couple of WD 1TB SSD's. Two of my internal 2TB drives are also WD. Never had a problem with any of them!

bwa

Ted d Loc: Green Valley, AZ.

This is the WD cloud system it. I guess I didn't explain that well enough. You can check it out on their website.

BigGWells Loc: Olympia, WA

I have 4 of them, only kind I use.

mizzee Loc: Boston,Ma

I have 2. Set up is easy,but do go to their website so the set up goes perfectly smoothly. I haven't had any problems with either one. I have the 2T and just got a 4T.

thephotoman Loc: Rochester, NY

While there may be better, for the money they are great. Two of mine are 8 years old and still going strong. I have 2 4tb and they work,well. The one thing you don't get is the ability to have them back up each other. One holds my originals, the other my edited work.

PWL46 Loc: Michigan

I have had good luck with Western Digital hard drives both external and portable. I did have a WD internal hard drive crash 15 or so years ago. Nothing is 100% in the mechanical/digital world - so as others have said - back up in a couple of places. Also, Western Digital has purchased San Disc and I would expect some awesome products in the near future.

sagill Loc: Hawaii

I would think a 4TB would be more than adequate. I have a 3 TB WD drive and have over 45,000 images stored, including many high res files and am not anywhere near capacity. yet.

amfoto1 Loc: San Jose, Calif. USA

I have four WD hard drives in one of my network attached storage devices (NAS) and they work fine. A little slow, compared to some others, but they are the "Green, eco-friendly" type of drive that use a slower rotational speed and vary the speed and power consumption with demand.... 5400 rpm or less. There are other, faster WB drives, such as a 7200 rpm 1TB WD "Black" that I use as the boot drive in a desktop. Just be certain what type drive you are getting, that external, because externally attached drives tend to be slower.

I use "enterprise" class Seagate and Hitachi drives in other NAS and in my desktop. One of those is a 3TB Hitachi as a secondary drive in my image editing desktop, used only for photos and a Photoshop "scratch disk" (a 100GB area of the HD is partitioned off for Photoshop's exclusive use). Enterprise class drives are designed and built for extra durability and long life.

Whatever you do, arrange for regular backups of your images. This might mean buying two external drives, then syncing and swapping them out every week or two. That way you keep fairly current and minimize risk of losing images to a catastrophic failure.

I use one external drive (a 3TB "G Drive"... I really don't know what brand hard disk is in it). That mirrors and serves as backup for the 3TB "photo disk" in my desktop image editing computer. This is my "hot data storage"... my most recent images that I'm most likely to be accessing and working with. 3TB is about two years worth.

Incidentally, Western Digital is owned and operated by Hitachi now... Has been for several years. HGST or Hitachi Global Storage Technology's main USA facility is a half a mile or less from where I'm sitting right now and a friend I often have a cup of coffee with at the local Starbucks is one of their top management hard drive manufacturing engineers. He knows I am a photographer and the type of storage I use, has given me a lot of helpful advice over the years. (One tip: Don't use an SSD to store photos! Their speed makes them great as a boot drive with the operating system and for running software programs... and they are improving, but not yet reliable enough for irreplaceable data. So he recommends only use SSD for things that can be reinstalled easily, if needed.)

BTW, yes, I asked if they had a factory outlet store or could get me "employee prices" on stuff... But he says no, unfortunately not. In fact, AFAIK, they don't manufacture much here in this facility. I think it's mostly research, development, design, testing, marketing and distribution of both WD and Hitachi products. He has conference calls with various folks in Asia at all times day and night, dealing with various issues in the manufacturing process.

After a year or so, I periodically transfer my images to "cold storage" in several NAS, each of which holds four drives and has it's own RAID system of redundancy (any single drive can fail, be replaced without powering down, and no data is lost). Four 2TB drives give about 5.2TB of usable space, or about three years worth of images at my current rate of usage (smaller image files from older, lower resolution cameras allow more years per NAS). I currently have six NAS and will be increasing to 8, and then 10, in order to have two complete sets of all years. These network devices are fairly fast to access, but not as fast as USB 3 or an internal SATA 3GB or 6GB drive. But I have less frequent need for the images, so don't need as fast access and can even leave the NAS powered down much of the time.

Which reminds me... I haven't yet backed up my most recent download... 1900 images shot on Sunday. They are safe because the originals are still on four memory cards, but I have been working on editing them in Lightroom and now that they are organized on my desktops "Photo" disk, need to back them up to the external for safe keeping.

I've had enough drives crash over the years, to know how important it is to back everything up. Especially irreplaceable images. I've known too many people who have lost a lot of their work for one reason or another. A friend's laptop was stolen and she lost many years of shots of her two wonderful dressage horses. She contacted me and I was able to replace the ones I'd shot. But many others she simply won't ever be able to replace.

Some folks back up "to the cloud" in one way or another. I have my own cloud, so to speak. So will you, with that external drive (just be sure to back it up too!) I don't trust outside services that I can't hard wire to and don't have control over. (I'm in the process of rebuilding online client galleries, after my service for that and much of my printing & products went out of business with no notice... And this is the second time that's happened in three years! Oh well, I like the look of the new site better anyway. Now if I can just get the money owed to me by the chop that closed. I just hope I picked a company that's more stable, this time!)