WD22TB My Book Desktop External Hard Drive, USB 3.0, External HDD with Password Protection and Backup Software - WDBBGB0220HBK-NESN

Good storage.Im not a big fan of the supplied software required, but as a backup storage device (along with a computer and a cloud solution), it's functional. The software didnt want to play with my operating system and kept prompting a need to install updates until I gave up.Connection is as fast as the USB port allows, so transfer of large files can be rough. Is compatible with windows 10 and 11.

I had been put off WD drives since my old (WD Elements desktop drive) had just one day (in 2014 sometime after about an year or so of reliable usage) become dead without any known reason (no physical damage ever, never moved from desktop) and I hadn't been able to recover any of my 3tb data (years of work). This experience obviously caused me an aversion for WD drives but I learnt to always have a total backup of my main drive/data and for the last 4 or so years I have been using a 10tb Seagate (desktop hub) with 02 5tb desktop Seagates as the total backups. Evidently I do my backups manually (it's not rocket science requiring clunky software, rather a sequential style drag/drop/copy/paste task) and while it is admittedly a mundane and repetitive exercise the minor PTSD like experience from my first WD experience mentioned in the first sentence will not allow me to rely on anything else to ensure data storage safety (my data isn't secret or even valuable, just digital memories, movies, tv shows and pc games/software etc...but important to me because I like to be a library of sorts where I dislike deleting things to free up space because offline data access is always a good thing if ever faced with connectivity issues). Am not a techie but I appreciate data safety and after about 7 or 8 weeks of research (online duh..que Billie's bad guy) I decided to part ways with some of my hard earned savings and dive back into the promises by Western Digital. It's not cheap (I live in beautiful Fiji) to buy things on Amazon as shipping/import costs add on to the overall purchase price (while our FJ dollar is relatively an underdog vis-a-vis the US dollar) so took the plunge (despite my earlier 10tb Seagate first arriving DOA, costing my an extra FJ$200 to ship it back for a "free" replacement...not free to the consumer but Seagate is worth it IMHO). This one cost me US$905.83 (so you can understand that in FJ$ it translates to FJ$1,830 or thereabouts, but under FJ$2K factoring in credit card charges as well). No am not rich, but needed another drive as my 10tb main has about 700gb free space left (since I don't delete anything). First of all, delivery and packaging - very nice (vocalize like Borat but am sincere). Amazon had those air space bags in the outer box so that was nice and the DHL service is very nice and reliable so got this drive today (2 weeks earlier than expected). Then the big test...was it DOA...nope, works well and straight out of the box as it should and drive passed the WD diagnostic tests (using the RAID 0 default). Contains 02 10tb WD Red drives which are nice. Casing is relatively okay, plastic but should be fine (it is a desktop drive after all and will remain on the desktop). Usable space is 18.1 TB (this is expected/normal for anyone who knows basic computing). Cables are nice with USB C to USB 3 and USB C to USB C with power adapter and cable. Have transferred about 100gb of data to the WD MyBook Duo from my 10tb Seagate and speeds, while not consistent (given large volumes of small files pdf, doc, ppt, xls etc) are relatively fast (using USB C to USB C but obviously other/host drive is USB 3). The MyBook Duo runs relatively quietly (no audible irritation) and there are obvious decibel increases when the drive is under stress but this is not an issue if you understand how mechanical hard drives work. While this review is arguably premature I am happy with my purchase for now and I have placed my trust in WD products again because my research shows that while its products may face issues at times, it appears WD cares about the consumers. I remain on my guard however because now my main 10tb, together with my 02 05tb Seagates (total 20tb) will be the data backup of this 20tb WD. Would I buy this again? That depends on how well this one lasts (and honestly, it should last my remaining lifetime given my usage habits but lets see, if it doesn't last, nope if it does, yes, because I don't delete anything and more storage is often a need for me). So for this product, for now, 03 out of 03 for the product itself and 02 out of 02 for the Amazon service and DHL delivery. Vinaka from Fiji.

The drive is formatted to 12.79TB using ext4 on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Seems to run cool and extremely quiet. The only way I can tell it is working is by putting my fingers on top of it and feeling for vibrations.UPDATE 1a: OCT 26, 2020The drive did get hot after months of use inside the original enclosure. It reached a temperature of 56C/132F. So that should be a concern. It runs 29C/84F inside the Synology 220J with active fan cooling. The room it was in was air-conditioned and no more than 75F ambient room temperature.Both drives are WDC WD140EDFZ-11A0VA0 14000.5GBFirmware 81.00A81 5400 RPM 512 MB Cache(HC530 are rated at 7200 RPM so these drives are throttled down to a lower RPM or at least one is - idk)HGST HC530 family drives with TDMRUPDATE 1b: OCT 26, 2020I purchased a second 14TB, approximately four months later than my first one. I wanted a low-power solution to keeping movie files available for Plex and Amazon had a Prime Day sale on an entry-level Synology DS220J NAS. The two Nvidia Shield Pro 2019 will handle any heavy transcoding (if any) because the NAS is not designed with Plex transcoding in mind.My second drive came in a different color box too so I initially panicked. But after running CrystalDisk Info and Speedtest, I was relieved that both boxes had the same exact drive inside the hard plastic enclosure. So I hope this serves as a heads up for anyone shucking these drives too. Rest assured they are the same drives with the same exact firmware. The first was purchased in June of 2020, and the second in August 2020. Four months apart. Keep that in mind as we head into 2021 and later.I did get different benchmark tests but I am hoping that it was due to having four months of data (7 TB) on the original drive and perhaps CrystalDisk performed its benchmarks from vastly different cylinders on each drive. As you can see from the included screengrab, the model numbers are identical. The DS220J also reported the same under DSM 6.2. I will have them set up as SHR mirroring in the NAS. I wish I could have done the benchmark test with two clean drives but I would need a third 14TB drive which would make it a bit beyond my means at this moment.UPDATE 1c: OCT 27, 2020(added one additional picture of Storage Manager, Synology's NAS app)I have both drives inside my Synology DS220j running Synology's parity consistency check for at least 30 hours non-stop. Both drives run significantly cooler on the Synology NAS than the WD plastic enclosures. In the WD plastic enclosure, they ran at 54-56c while on the NAS, they run 30c-33c. Average about 20 degrees hotter centigrade in the WD factory enclosure. I wonder if earlier failures I had with other WD USB drives in the past could be attributed to them running hotter than normal. Even if you don't need the advanced features of a NAS, I would recommend a lower-end less expensive model like the DS200j just to keep the drives running cooler and of course for its data redundancy protection. I will continue to update for at least one year. If the nas works out for me really well for the next twelve months, I'll upgrade to a four-bay unit to use some of the more advanced raid implementations.UPDATE: JUNE 16, 2022Since my last update, I purchased two more additional drives and I have upgraded NAS from the DS220j to the Synology DS920+ (four-bay intel CPU model). The drives are configured in a Synology Raid setup which holds a shared data storage for five PCs and 4K 2160p Plex library. Two 2019 Nvidia Shield Pro streamers and two smart TVs stream movies and DVR newscasts from it. The DS920+ has reported 4722 Hrs (Powered on) and the drives remain year-around at 30C/86F. S.M.A.R.T reports zero errors across all four drives. The DS920+ is plugged into a UPS and it receives power reports from the UPS through its data connection.So far I have no problems with these WD14TB drives. I honestly feel it's just the lousy plastic enclosures that they come in that cause many problems due to overheating and possibly user error with usb/power cables. But once they are in an active cooled protected environment like a NAS, they are very reliable.