Do not purchase this Drive
927625
I purchased this Western Digital Drive back in June. At first, the drive seemed to be working as advertised, although it did not operate in USB 3.0 Mode. It would only connect as USB 2.0. I thought it was a problem with my computer.

Fortunately, I run an IT organization, so I had our Techs check it out. Turns out the Drive shipped with a cable that would not support USB 3.0. I had to buy my own USB 3.0 cable to get it to work in that mode.

Over the last couple of months, the drive has gotten more and more problematic. Disconnecting intermittently, slow transfer speeds, etc. I decided I needed to replace it.

Unfortunately, before I could get a new drive, this one completely failed. It appears the controller board has failed. I now have to send the drive out to a drive recovery shop to see if they can recover my files. At this point, that's the easiest, but most expensive way to recover my data.

You can be sure my company will not be purchasing any drives from Western Digital, and I recommend that anyone in the market for a drive avoid Western Digital products.

Norm Fjeldheim
CIO, Qualcomm
4518664
I bought this drive to assist my mother in law.  Her computer is old and I was hoping to avoid a costly data recovery (aka tech rape).

When the "one-touch" software installed, it forced a reboot.  The computer never came back up.

I figured I'd made a mistake so I bought a brand new Seagate internal drive, built it up with Windows XP, and reinstalled the external drive.  Once again, the software installation for one-touch forced me to reboot - and again the computer would no longer boot.

I tried several utilities to recover the data, to no avail.  So I took both drives to the local data recovery place.  They informed me that the file system was corrupt on both drives, likely due to whatever I'd last done on the drive before it crashed.

If you insist on purchasing this brand, DO NOT INSTALL the software.  The techs at Maxtor were not at all helpful.
4256877
I've bought this drive (640G) in 2009 as an exchange for seagate 500G which originally came with my
dell desktop

(Seagate becomes somewhat noisy and I also wanted a little bigger capacity.
denote, that despite the noise, Seagate worked fine for 3.5 years and I never had any data loss/correctness problem with it).

It turned out it was a BIG mistake ( I should have bought another Seagate).

WDC, which I bought, worked OK for 1 year then I couldn't boot from it.
Since it was under warranty, I called WD and they send me a replacement drive.
Luckily I was able to connect a bad drive as a slave and salvage all the important data.

Today, the replacement drive (which I have had for less then a year developed the problems
: "Timeout waiting for IRQ" per Dell Diagnostic Suite.

I called WD again and they are sending me second replacement.
Representative told me they sending "re-certified" drives to replace bad ones under warranty
He assured me "re-certified" are as good as new.

I am EXTREMELY disappointed in this drive quality - 2 replacements in 2.5 year,
each time I need to spent hours on diagnostics, salvaging data, reinstalling OSs etc.
(I understand one can get wrong but two in the row !). I am consider myself very lucky
that in both cases I can connect bad drives as slave and at least access them to get the data out.

I'll never buy their product again.

P.S. I need to mention that their customer service is good, no waiting on the phone, replacements
are send quickly ( they need credit card if you want advanced replacement - getting a new drive
before sending them back an old one, while cc is not actually charged, this amount is sort "withheld" from your balance).
But id doesn't cover for such quality problems with the drive itself.
1226289
I bought a 120 GB last April. It broke last Dec. My data was gone when I returned it for replacement. Last week the replaced drive broke too. It was out of warranty and I had to pay for repariment.
2101755
Bought this drive November 20th, 2015.  Installed it as a replacement the beginning of December. Drive died last night.  Was trying to create a Windows image on the external hard drive I use for backup purposes.  Failed halfway through.  Recommended running a "chkdsk /r"  I tried, and about 30% of the way in the drive froze and was rebooted.  Went into BIOS check and got a Long DST error asking again to run "chkdsk /r" again. Booted and started getting all kinds of S:/$secure errors.  Rebooted and the drive gets to the splash screen and goes through a shutdown-recycle-shutdown sequence endlessly.  Pulled the drive to try and mount it externally to recover data. No go.  Thought the "Smart Drive" software was supposed to prevent this.  Very disappointed in this purchase and will be looking to Amazon/Samsung for an RMA.
4156778
Called tech support because of drive failure today. Found out this drive is 3 months out of warranty. However they can help me try to recover data at a price. How kind! In fact this drive is a replacement drive for one that failed within a 2 year warranty. I also found out that this replacement drive is a "recertified" drive...whatever that means. But you probably can guess. Normally one assumes that a very large capacity drive like this one would last a long time. Well it doesn't. To reiterate, the first drive lasted less than 2 years while the replacement recertified drive lasted just over 2 years.

My recommendation is if you own a Seagate drive don't expect it to last past warranty. So, back up your backups around the 18th month.

I will never buy another Seagate drive
1972939
This drive is a horrible option for mac users.
The firmware update will cause the drive to become unusable. Support will be of no help whatsoever.
There is no where online to download the smartware software. The software is only available on the drive itself and the firmware update wipes it out.

The tech documentation tells you to uninstall the smartware software if you had issues with the firmware update. It neglects to mention that you will not be able to reinstall it.

Save your money! Save your time! Save your Sanity. Do not buy this drive.
3073652
I don't recommend this product to anyone.  I only had this harddrive for a couple months before I started having problems with it.  On several occasions it took my computer a little while to recognize it, then after only four months it crashed.  I called WD tech support, their tech didn't act like he knew nothing and they only wanted to warranty the harddrive but didn't want to recover my data.  After I researched it online, apparently I was not the only one that had this problem with the same product.  I don't think I will be doing business with WD anymore.
3045983
So far, I'm pretty damn pissed about my purchase. Dropped $300 on probably the most expensive back up drive you can get and since I've had it it's been nothing but issues. Backed up our drives just fine the first time. Then, after upgrading our OS (which said would work fine with TC), one of our drives for corrupted. After days of trying to fix it, we gave up and reset the thing to factory and started from scratch. Was fine for another 2 weeks. Then just stopped backing up. Tried manually, said couldn't access backup. Tried hard reset. No luck. Not sure what I'll do at this point but for $300, it should not be this much of a headache. Feels like a complete ripoff.
4694216
Sadly, it's been just over 60 days since I bought this drive and it has already died.
3513202
I bought this product on the 8th of Sept. To qualify my comments  - I am a Techie and have been building my PCs for a long long time .. so I do know what I am am talking about.

This drive failed within a month of very light use and as I was very busy, it took me another month to diagnose the problem.

I ran the Data Lifeguard Diagnostic utility from Western Digital that tell be that the drive has errors that it not able to fix. I even reformated the disk but it fails at different sectors.

Since I missed the window to return the product (Oct 11), I requested Amazon for the warranty information so I can return it to the manufacturer, over a week ago with no reply as yet.

Most of us store our very precious data on hard drives. I would not recommend this drive to anyone and more so it has shaken my confidence in all WD drives.
4236524
Update: it broke

It did not take long for this drive to become totally corrupt, and no matter what I swing at it I can't set up a new partition table and use the drive any longer.

Very frustrating.
4581826
Absolute garbage. I used this as a recovery disk and the drive failed. As in all of my irreplaceable data is forever lost. Toshiba customer service is cold and awful. They refuse to pay for data recovery. I will never again buy a Toshiba product and I will go out of my way to tell everyone to avoid buying their products. This will not be the last poor review I post about them.
631818
DO NOT BUY
SERVICE BEING SHUT DOWN DECEMBER 31, 2016.  IT IS UNUSABLE AFTER THAT.  CHECK SEAGATE WEBSITE FOR MORE INFO.
1386237
I purchased five drives and two failed in the first month. This drive might be okay if you plan to archive data and store it in a safe deposit box. I do not plan to return the two drives, even though they are under warranty, because I would not trust the replacements. I will never again trust Seagate with my data.
1152661
It worked fine for about 35 days and then something happened and the drive became unreadable/corrupted - during a USB 3.0 driver update of all things.

The drive didn't show back up so I unplugged it and plugged it back in. You couldn't 'eject' the drive as it was not showing up.

That was all it took. When it did show up , it was as a new drive and windows failed to mount the drive or even assign the name I had given it.

The dreaded 'you need to format this drive before you can use it'.

As as another poster indicated, the drive itself was spinning just fine - this appears to be a SATA to USB interface hardware/firmware issue so I made a command decision and chose to pull the drive from the case and plug it into a SATA port on my motherboard and it works just fine.

Of course I lost all my data which is a huge PITA. I've had multiple external drives from multiple vendors and have never seen something like this.

So I'm just going to say: Look at the feedback and the numbers - the 1 star reviews equal the 5 star in number. That tells you this drive has issues. Fair warning.
2276371
I actually purchased two of these drives at the same time, a 500GB model and the 1TB Model.

Withing less than one years time, both models began experiencing what is known as the dreaded click of death and failed with a complete loss of all data.

With all of the reviews I have read here thus far, I thought I should be a responsible consumer and post my review as a warning to anyone thinking about purchasing a LaCie drive now or in the future.

Do yourself a favor and look elsewhere, the LaCie drives are not a reliable external storage solution.

If you want to protect your data, do not put it on a LaCie.  You have been warned.