Do the homework before you buy, there is a WORLD of difference between this one, and the competition that sells for $20 less.
Good news first. If you were to buy this unit, and just throw away the case and save the hard drive - you would SAVE about ~$100 from buying the bare hard drive alone. Yes, read that again, WD is GIFTING you a Helium filled, NAS quality (as in Enterprise grade) 8TB hard drive that retails for nearly $300 for a bare drive, for ~$190. Don't take my word for it, do a search for the WD80EZZX and see what you find - that's what they are sticking in this black box.
The competition, is sticking an inferior technology, pretty unreliable hard drive (Sept 1-19th reviews shows 12 out of 62 reviews with 1 star; that's 20% FAILURE) being stuck inside their box, and you are saving $20. Now, ask yourself - would you rather save $20 and run a 20% chance of losing your data? Are your taxes, your pictures, movies, games, homework, business receipts and emails worth the extra $20? Would coming home to find that years worth of data is irretrievably gone make you more angry, than saving $20 makes you happy?
Seriously, this is your money, not mine. My use is simple - this is a backup device for my Mac. This drive will typically come formatted with exFAT so it will work for both Windows and Mac. I never trust anything that comes from anyone, because I don't know nor do I trust any manufacturer. So, I ALWAYS format every storage device; this will be formatted for my Mac; so I will KNOW that the drives have no malware, no Trojans, nothing on the drive that I didn't put on there myself. I will then use it for a backup device. If I were to use it for my Windows machine, I would format it to NTFS and install my Windows Backup software, but this is my decision; you are (naturally) free do do what you want. I just suggest that you strongly consider doing something similar.
What good is having a backup device, if the backup device is unreliable? Would you trust a seatbelt that was defective? Would you use a defective parachute? Why would anyone use a defective hard drive in a backup device? The choice is yours, I humbly suggest you chose wisely.
| Hard Drive | 6 TB Desktop |
|---|---|
| Number of USB 2.0 Ports | 1 |
