Review on 📁 WD My Book 4TB USB 3.0 Desktop External Hard Drive - WDBBGB0040HBK-NESN by James Wiley

I checked the online reviews of the WD My Book Duo and ordered it with some reservations. Complaints I've read include software, heat, noise and vibration, speed, and general usefulness as an external drive. My first experience is below. If there are any problems with this drive in the future I will update this review. My 12TB Duo sat unopened in its factory container and contained two 6TB WD Red drives (WD60EFRX).1. Utility and Setup. This drive is connected to an older Mac Pro (2010) running OS X Mojave. The installation and service software has been simplified as much as possible. Simply select several options one after the other, done. Five out of five.2. Heat. what is the heat The drive has a clear top and a bottom with ventilation provided. I have it standing with its feet on a hard surface and the case doesn't seem to differ from room temperature. Five out of five.3. vibration and noise. When you hold the case in your hands, you can feel a slight vibration when searching and reading/writing discs. When they are resting there is no visible vibration or noise. The read/write seek noise is quieter than the drives in my MacPro tower, so I can't complain that My Book Duo is too loud. It appears unusually quiet and is small enough to be easily placed in a safer location. If it were on my desktop it might be a distraction, but I can't hear it. Silent SSDs spoil us, it seems to me. Four out of five.4. Speed. No "impressions" here - I measured using the Blackmagicdesign Disk Speed Test. On my USB 2.0 system, this drive writes at 24.4 MB/s and reads at 36.7 MB/s. This is fairly typical in my experience with other drives - unusually slow for USB 2.0. For daily use of this drive, I installed a USB-C (3.1) PCI card in my computer, and through this interface the device writes at a speed of 240.6 MB / s and reads at a speed of 342.3 MB / s. This is much faster than any of the disks it is backed up or restored to. These speeds are enough to stream any 1080p video format (including 10-bit).5. General benefit. I mainly use this device for unencrypted Time Machine backups. This is a fairly simple task, and drives are ideal for this application. If they prove trustworthy (no early failures), I have room to temporarily store large files that aren't otherwise backed up. However, those who complain about the loss of valuable data are ignoring an important truth: data drives *always* fail sooner or later! If you don't plan this, you risk your data. Finally, performance and speed per dollar seem good as long as premature failure is avoided. We will see. Five out of five so far.