WD 1TB Elements SE SSD Portable SSD USB 3.0 up to 400 MB/s 2-meters drop resistance

This WD 2TB Elements Portable External Hard Drive has been absolutely brilliant—so much so that I ended up buying two! Before this, I used traditional hard drives with moving parts and often faced issues with reliability. This hard drive, being an SSD, is not only small and lightweight but also super fast and reliable. As a YouTuber, it’s crucial for me to have dependable storage for my content, and this hard drive definitely delivers. There’s a lot less chance of failure since there are no moving parts. Overall, it’s a 5-star product in my book, and I highly recommend it to anyone in need of reliable storage.

Very compact and easy to use at a very competitive price for 2TB.I bought this specifically to take my PS4 games off the internal PS5 SSD but I didn't want to get a 'game drive' specific one as I would have more freedom if I wanted to partition it and backup some PC files as well.The setup couldn't have been easier, I took it out of the box, plugged it in and the PS5 recognised it instantly. I had to format the drive before I could use it which I thought might take a few minutes at most but only took 5 seconds, then I selected around 360GB of PS4 games/apps and started the transfer.After the format I had 1.8TB free which is more than enough and with all drives they need space for their base operating software which is usually a small fraction off the stated capacity, a lot of people clearly don't understand this from some of the reviews complaining they got less capacity than they purchased -_-The transfer was speed really good for a physical drive, better than I was expecting, it took just over an hour for it to finish moving the whole 350+GB to the external drive.My PS5 told me once that the drive wasn't removed properly after powering on after being in rest mode, I didn't remove the drive at all so I'm not sure why it said that. This error message has only come up once and happened the first time the console had been in rest mode with the new drive connected. The console has been in rest mode and turned off multiple times after this message and hasn't given me the error since so it may just be a one time thing.I'll update this review if I come across any issues.Loading PS4 games from the External as opposed to launching them from the internal SSD was a little bit slower. All times below were timed from the point of clicking resume on my game file to actually getting into the game.- Resident Evil 7 took 77sec to load which I'd played the day before on the PS5 SSD which probably took under 30 seconds. In-game the performance was perfect, no frame drop, no noticeable delay on textures rendering in.- Horizon Zero Dawn took 30-40sec which was actually quicker than RE7 despite being a huge open world game, the in-game performance was perfect too even with the 60FPS patch.- God of War took 29 seconds to load into the game.- Batman Arkham Knight took just 32 seconds to load my save and get into the game.- Mortal Shell took just 20 seconds to load into the game.- Call of Duty Modern Warfare took 56 seconds to load into the game from chapter selection.

Loads of storage, easy to build up

On unboxing you get a nice, compact, smart looking unit. Then you plug it into your desktop PC. Despite the A3 printed sheet which contains two illustrations (1of the device showing how to connect it and 2 - another of it plugged into a laptop) the remaining space is taken up with their legal disclaimers in about 14 languages. Connecting most USB HDD's is simply a matter of plugging the correct end of the cable into the device and the other in a suitable USB 2.0 port, or better, on the PC/laptop/other devices etc. It appears other buyers seemed to expect this action. Not so with the latest version of Windows 10. Disk Management did not recognise the drive, so a quick call to their support line within five minutes of opening the package was necessary. Unfortunatley my northeastern accent was as difficult for the operator to understand as was his heavy Asian accent to me. We did manage after a few minutes and ultimately, a very pleasant conversation led to their Western Digital Lifeguard program being downloaded and installed. It's identical to Windows Disk Management except their own software recognises the HDD and allows you to initialise it. I was also given more useful advice on connecting to DVD's etc.One useful piece of information tech support did supply was that the device should be plugged into the USB ports on the rear of any desktop PC, as the front ports tend to have slightly different voltages which can cause some problems.Device is now working effectively and has attained copy speeds of up to 120Mb/s on many of my larger files. Same sized files copied to a flash drive take a bit longer (My test was a 1.8 Gb to the HDD = 16 sec and to a 128 Gb flash drive - over six minutes.I would advise anyone thinking of purchasig this item to have a close look at the description supplied. Apparently there is a new model available, which could fix future problems for buyers. AND I did notice despite complaints by some MAC users it does state you have to reformat the drive for MAC's.

I'm really happy with this external hard drive! It arrived well packaged, and considering its capacity, the price was great. It's been working smoothly so far, and I'm confident it'll be a reliable storage solution. Overall, good value for the money.