Simple yet effective seems to be the moto that Western Digital are using as of late when designing their hard drives, they all seem to just work as advertised without any pointless frills that other manufactures seem to throw in. No coffee coaster DVD’s or wasteful partitions on the drive that are full of useless software that no one ever uses.
The design of the WD Elements is beautifully simplistic, if you are looking for a fancy futuristic style I do not quite think this drive enclose is for you. However, if you just want a simple black box that sits in your desk working away silently and reliably you should certainly consider this Hard Drive, because of this simplistic design it has a solid and durable feel to it. With no ventilation holes the only openings in the drive are for the connectors, Mini USB and Power, this means the drive runs incredibly quite.
Western Digital is pushing the capacity of their drives all the time, the WD Elements range currently coming in a wide choice of sizes from 500GB to 3TB. Although this drive doesn’t come with USB 3.0, it isn’t very widespread and probably won’t appear on computers as standard for the next few years. However if you are wanting to future proof your hard drive, with the fastest speeds for years to come you may want to look at other desktop hard drives such as the My Book Essential. Again, on the other hand you have to ask if the drive will even last long enough as hard drives always have a certain shelf life and you may be purchasing a backup drive before USB 3.0 even becomes common place.
I am a fan of Western Digital, and for good reason they create awesome hard drives. Yes this one isn’t future proof, however if you look at the amount of positive Amazon reviews you can see that almost 1000 people have given it 5 stars and almost another 300 giving it 4 stars which must say something about its quality.
Key Features of this External Hard Drive
- Solid Simple Design
- Reliable
- Plug and Play
- No unnecessary software