3rd and last WD drive ever
359513
This was my 3rd WD drive. First failed after 1 year becuse I plugged in my printer power cord into it.  O.K. My falt, but the drive should have an internal fuze for power surges.  The second only lasted 7 months and just stopped working for no reasion, I lost half my OIF pictures from my last deployment. They are gone, and gone for ever as the CD they were backed up on got lost in a box in my last move.  The 3rd never worked out of the box at all.  I will never buy WD ever again.
1544199
I've grown very suspicious of trusting mechanical hard drives.  WD Black have the best warranty.  So far so good.  I use it for my main data drive which I back up to a raid 1 NAS.
742780
Have had a little over a year, was great for first 6 months, last 7-8 months a nightmare.  What are the odds of 3 brand new drives failing in the same slot, one after the other?  Put a new drive in, it rebuilds, seems fine for a few weeks, same thing happens, drive corrupted, need new drive and rebuild.  Time to give up on this one.
3671167
Never buying Seagate garbage again !!
Died after 10 months taking all my movies and music with it
This is the second Seagate drive I've had fail on me, never again!
$130 gone /poof
++Update++
I've spent a lot of time working with this drive in an attempt to recover the terabytes, Seagate's drives, and its components, being garbage is widely documented online, so there is a lot of information out there. Common failures are the control board and drive head, and the info to replace both is out there, in my case it was the control board , disconnected it and mounted the drive inside my computer, fixed :)
May be worth your time looking into, Just sayin
4371675
I bought this from best buy when it was on sale. After a couple of months, it stopped working. When I connect to my laptop, I can feel the disk inside is spinning, the light comes on, but the drive doesn't show up on my computer. I have varioius disks and flash drives and never had any issue. WD is the worst
3981928
It has failed twice since I bought it 3 years ago. Seagate did repair it for me once, which was nice, but still, I would not recommend buying this hard drive.
3796409
I have been using Western Digital drives exclusively for twenty-five years. I am so confident in WD drives that when I buy a new computer I immediately switch out the OEM drive with a more efficient and larger capacity WD drive. Over this twenty-five year period I have had thirty-four WD drives, of these I had an issue with one of them, called WD and they shipped over-night a drive to me that was a step up from the one I had purchased.
4923007
I had one ST3500514NS, 500 GB Seagate Constellation ES drive as my system drive. I also had 2 X 1 TB WD Black drives as data drives in my desktop system. I installed the Constellation drive in 2010 along with a MB upgrade. This drive was rock solid until Friday morning.

It failed without warning, and cannot be accessed. There is a burn mark on the PCB next to the power connector, so I suppose that is the failure. The WD drives are still being recognized by the BIOS, and the MB passes POST. I have requested warranty service, and Seagate is sending an advance drive for the $10 this service costs.

All I can say is that the failure is no doubt a $.01 part on the PCB that is costing me $$$ in time and money and headaches. Can I buy a good drive anywhere?
785018
I have had this drive for two years now, which was long enough to trust it with all my most important data, and tonight it died without notice while I'm ftp transferring websites to a new host.

Worst of all it has ALL my backups, and all the recordings of the music I was about to get published (I'm Rev. Barry Willie Black and I have, or should I say had 56 CD sets mastered for release this year and 55 others begun) , my entire mp3 collection from 10 years, about 140GB to be exact, as well as my entire software download collection and the backups from every system I have had for the last ten years.

A disk with my most important data in the world.

So you tell me... Would you buy this drive? Would you trust it like I have? I hope not!!

Other reviews I have read, including those above me on this page and on Seagate's forums, do detail that the data is not normally lost, as it is the pcb board that is at fault, so I am going to void my warranty and get a new enclosure, but I would warn anybody who decides to grab one of these or the larger 1.5TB disks that they are gambling on how long it will take before the failure, and trust me, I have read endless reviews on these drives since last Thursday night when mine died, and most say they same thing. Don't buy it, and for the sake of your sanity, don't trust important data to their care and keeping... so sez Rev. Barry Willie Black
631818
DO NOT BUY
SERVICE BEING SHUT DOWN DECEMBER 31, 2016.  IT IS UNUSABLE AFTER THAT.  CHECK SEAGATE WEBSITE FOR MORE INFO.
4544148
This is the second WD 4TB Elements Portable HD that has failed on me! The first one failed in 20 days, rendering everything on it unretrievable.  I got it replaced with same thinking it was just bad luck as I have had good luck with WD over the years. Now, 6 months into using the replacement (same model), it FAILS AGAIN!. DON'T BUY THIS HARD DRIVE! This time, I had some files on it that I dod not have time to back up ... gone forever! Not even Data Rescue worked (which is a POA and time staking endeavor to go though).
Of note: I am in a habit of properly eject a drive before disconnecting it and always carry in a protective case. These drives have never been dropped or jolted around carelessly. I carry them in my knapsack with my other drive when out of the studio and all other drive are fine.
793102
Always running out of storage, like me?  2TB will last a while.  Meets expected WD quality and performance.
3715466
Precisely 1 year and 3 days after purchase, drive completely died. Perhaps unrelated, but one of the screws under the warranty sticker appears to have either backed out or been otherwise forced outwards, separating a portion of the sticker from the body of the drive. Huh.
Thankfully I back up data, but anything I missed is gone. Does not show up at all under device manager even.
3797285
This is my second external WD drive. First was a myBook, second was this passport. Both died shortly after warranty period ended. The drives were never dropped or moved much. No cheap recovery could be performed on either.
WD used to be my goto company for HDs, not anymore.
2722422
Mine just died and it is not covered by warranty.
And here is some stuff to read about this drive: [...]
1278868
I have been a fan of WD for years.  When I was ready for a replacement in my HP Pavilion dm4, this was a natural choice.  However, the drive failed within 3 months.  No luck returning it to Amazon and, so far, to WD either.
695674
Drive worked flawlessly up until last week. Used in multiple environments (regular storage, bootable drive to install windows, ect.) Now the drive is totally dead and multiple computers cannot detect it.