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Western Digital

Western Digital puts the figures in the title and software in the bullets

Four drives, four families

A five-terabyte portable drive, an eight-terabyte drive rated for continuous recording, a four-terabyte drive tuned for enclosures and a two-terabyte SATA SSD.

The strongest figure on the shelf

The recording drive publishes a workload rating of 550 TB a year — the highest annual duty figure published anywhere in that family here — beside 7200 rpm and a 256 MB cache. That rating is the argument for the drive, and it sits in the title.

What the bullets do instead

That same drive never names its interface. The enclosure drive prints its three figures in the title and spends five bullets on continuous operation, compatibility work and running costs without a single value. The SATA SSD gives two of its five bullets to a cloud subscription and an imaging application, publishes no endurance quantity, and the only length of time anywhere on it belongs to a trial. The portable drive is sold on password protection and scheduled copying, with its interface named only as SuperSpeed USB.

Every Western Digital unit reviewed here

  • NAS hard drives

    Western Digital Red Plus 4 TB, 5400 rpm, with five bullets and no second figure

    4 TB · 5400 rpm · SATA 6 Gb/s · tuned for enclosure workloads · no cache, no MTBF, no warranty, no recording method

    A four-terabyte drive for enclosures whose title carries every figure the page has, and whose five bullets describe continuous operation, compatibility testing and lower running costs without printing a single value.

    Best for: A quiet enclosure in a lived-in room where the slower spindle is wanted deliberately, bought by someone who will get the remaining figures from the maker’s own datasheet.

    ≈ $195 / £205 / 210 €

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  • Internal hard drives

    Western Digital Purple Pro 8 TB, 550 TB a year, and no interface at all

    8 TB · 3.5-inch · 7200 rpm · 256 MB cache · 550 TB per year workload · OptiNAND and AllFrame named · interface not published

    An eight-terabyte drive with the highest published workload rating in this batch, whose four bullets say nothing about the product and whose interface is never named.

    Best for: A machine that writes continuously — a recorder, a surveillance store, a busy archive — where the annual duty figure is the deciding line and the interface can be confirmed elsewhere.

    ≈ $400 / £373 / 429 €

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  • External hard drives

    Western Digital My Passport 5 TB, the largest portable here, on a name instead of a generation

    5 TB · portable · SuperSpeed USB named without a generation · cables supplied, in the plural · password protection and scheduled copies · no rate, no measurement

    A five-terabyte portable drive that publishes password protection, scheduled copying and a Chromebook certification, and that names its interface only as SuperSpeed USB.

    Best for: A laptop whose working files need a second copy on separate hardware, made on a schedule and locked with a password, where five terabytes is the requirement.

    ≈ $285 / £166 / 167 €

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  • SATA SSDs

    Western Digital WD Blue SA510 2 TB, with two bullets spent on subscriptions

    2 TB · 2.5-inch · up to 560 MB/s read · up to 520 MB/s write · endurance described in words · two of five bullets about bundled software · no TBW, no MTBF, no warranty term

    A two-terabyte drive whose title carries both sequential figures and whose five bullets spend two of themselves on a cloud subscription and an imaging application, publishing no endurance quantity at all.

    Best for: An upgrade from a spinning drive in a desktop machine or a laptop, where two terabytes at this interface is the requirement and the cloning tool is genuinely useful.

    ≈ $300 / £268 / 325 €

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Every price named in a summary was read on the date that review carries. What a shop asks today is shown beside the product, and it moves.