The Californian firm Western Digital Corporation is currently one of the benchmarks within the domain of creation of reliable hard drives and solid state drives encompassed under the WD and HGST brands.
The extremely compact WD Elements 2TB USB 3.0 is a 2.5" portable external hard drive spinning at 5400 rpm, sporting exceedingly reduced dimensions — 4.40 in (11,1 cm) depth x 3.20 in (8, 2 cm) width x 0.82 in ( 2,1 cm) height — and very low weight — 0,51 lb (231 gr) — as well as being a high capacity storage device, enhanced by a remarkable versatility of use.
This has undoubtedly been one of the most successful portable external hard drives in terms of worldwide sales during the year 2015 and these two first months of 2016.
And there has been a slew of good reasons for it:
- A very convenient Plug and Play Design, enabling to quickly switch it on and begin to enjoy it.
- The USB 3.0 connectivity providing maximum performance to transfer files to the disc or from it.
The speed improvement of data in this regard has been so huge that the usual 13 minutes time needed to transfer a 2-hour HD movie using a USB.2 connector, is reduced to just three minutes using the USB 3.0 port.
The transfer speeds are approximately of 115 MB/s (920 Mbps) USB 3.0 Read Speed, 107 MB/s (856 Mbps) USB 3.0 Write Speed, 35 MB/s (280 Mbps) USB 2.0 Read Speed and 30 MB/s (240 Mbps) USB 2.0 Write Speed.
Anyway, the WD Elements 2TB USB 3.0 is backward compatible with desktops, laptops and all kind of devices featuring USB.2 ports.
- A pretty elegant and beautiful design in black colour, with sleek surfaces and rounded contours.
- The massive capacity of 2TB in such a tiny and light design is something really praiseworthy and makes possible a stunning mobility. The user can take the device with its data anywhere and comfortably, even easily tucked away in his/her pocket.
- It´s very silent, and the noise produced by the hard disc spinning is barely perceptible. When it stops working, a few minutes later it stops turning and a small LED goes on lit.
- It takes the power from the USB, so it doesn´t need any transformer.
- It doesn´t heat very much after a lot of hours of continuous use.
- It´s formatted NTFS and compatible with Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows XP, being also possible to format it for Mac.
- It includes the Software WD SmartWare Pro, which enables to make security copies and directly keep them in the hard disc drive or, even, to go them up directly to your cloud in Dropbox.
- It has the added bonus of significantly improving the performance of both desktop computers and laptops, whose hard discs are often very full of all kind of data, which on being very quickly transferred to the WD Elements 2TB USB 3.0, it results in the gaining of a lot of free space.
- It works perfectly with the Xbox One, fostering its capacity and performance, since the drive is recognized quickly and you can use it to save games and apps, and additionally to store media for playback.
- It has proved to be a top-notch external drive for backups.
- It offers a large amount of storage space for a low cost, and its simple design allows it to work well with computers, game consoles and media players, following a no frills approach keynote which strengthens its versatility.
- It can become a reserve choice for professional photographers and video makers wanting to store their camera raw files images and movies in a very small, light and portable hard disc drive.
There´s also the chance of using it connected to the TV and record the favourite Full HD programs, movies, sports, documentary films, etc.
The upshot of it is that the WD Elements 2TB USB.3.0 is an external storage device offering large capacity and ease of use in a very small package, with the further boon of a quality/price ratio virtually unbeatable — it is presently being sold for around 87 dollars —, tons of capacity, a great speed of data transfer thanks to its USB 3.0 connectivity working seamlessly and enabling a data transfer rate of up to 5GB/s, while with USB 2.0 reaches up to 480 Mb/s is very comfortable to transport with its large volume of data, and above all, is reliable.
The WD Elements 2TB USB 3.0 is a very good alternative to the Seagate Expansion Portable Drive 2TB USB 3.0, both of them being highly similar in vast majority of aspects, while the Seagate Expansion is a bit faster, though on the other hand, it lacks any backup software included and the WD Elements 2TB USB. 3.0 design is much more beautiful and better devised.
But neither the WD Elements 2TB USB 3.0 nor the Seagate Expansion Portable Driver 2TB USB 3.0 have security features, and they are not prepared to store and protect sensitive data, so if this is the priority, models like the WD My Passport Slim or the Seagate Backup Plus Slim are much better choices in this regard.
© Text and Pictures: José Manuel Serrano Esparza
