Repair External Hard Drive With Disk Utility

I just added the WD 4TB Elements External Desktop Hard Disk Drive to my� back up solution (6 hard drives) and Windows 10.� I disconnected the power and USB cable from a full WD hard drive and replaced it with this new drive and fired it up. It works great, just like I would expect from Western Digital.

Wow, I love this hard drive. It is soooooo much faster than a regular old external drive with a spinning disk. I will be able to use this with my base model M1 Mac Mini. I can't wait!

This external hard drive works really nice and quiet, and it saves lots of disk space on my laptop. The price for it is also reasonable.

This external hard disk drive stores a ton and is light and portable. Great for video on the go editing.

eSata works good for an external disk drive.

Excellent External hard drive.

I use it as an external hard drive for photos.

Works great with my Macs for video editing. Use Disk Utility to re-format drive for Apple, and it's plug-and-play. Bought to begin editing files on the road and finish at home. Scared by SanDisk reliability and wanted to get full use of Thunderbolt 4. Did not test speeds but it's very snappy. When expanded as in product photo, a small fan cools drive. Collapsing center turns it off and reduces size by a half-inch (to 4.0 inches) for travel.

I had a support chat with OWC first before ordering this because of the cost involved. Wanted to be sure that I was sure that it would work with my 2019 Mac Pro. They assured me it would, so I ordered confidently. Installation was simper than simple, just lift the top, place the card in a slot, replace the top, boom. Booted, holding my breath, and it showed up in the disk utility. But showed only 8.64GB of available storage. I tried the Erase (initialize) option, Still 8.64GB. Then, went into the partition setup of the disk utility, and voila, there it showed the full 4TB (well, 3.84TB) storage. Once I claimed it all for a single large partition and then reinitialized the drive (using MacOS Extended, Journaled), all was well. I was then able to make full use of the drive. It seems funny to call it a drive, when it's actually just a thin chip on a PCIE-card. Even what you see in the picture there isn't really it. Most of that bulge is just heat sink. Amazing they can stuff that much storage onto something so small. Also a rather amazing amount to pay for a drive, but I wanted fast, non-internal storage, and lots of it, so felt the need and went for it. So far, it is behaving perfectly, is indeed fast. So after a few anxious 8GB moments, I'm relieved and happy.

First thing I ran a disk utility(for 14hrs) to test reliability and it had no issues. Recently I cloned my operating system to it and then used it as a startup drive for 10hrs while I made some repairs to the original start up drive. While it wasn't as fast as the internal hard drive, it performed well. It's size, reliability and flexibility combine to make it an important part of my needs.