WD Elements Desktop 8TB

Hard drives are unambiguous things about which little can be said when they work properly. First of all: this WD Elements 8TB is an excellent hard drive: you can barely hear it and with its USB3 connection it is nice and fast (depending on the port to which it is connected, of course). The reason why I give it three stars for reliability is the fact that I have not used it for too long to say anything meaningful about it. In any case, it passed a stress test – writing a whopping 5 tB in one go – with flying colors. All in all, I'm happy with it. However, it has one small annoying characteristic: the operation of the on/off switch. Its presence was the deciding factor in my choice of this particular HD, which I purchased as a backup for a large number of files of an average of 2 to 3 GB that are very important to me. It goes without saying that you only connect the appropriate backup medium when you need it. However, once I connected it to my desktop PC, it turned out that it is enabled by default when the PC starts up. So now I have to press that button for five seconds after every startup to switch it off, which of course I forget half the time (you can switch it on by briefly pressing the button). At first I thought I had done something wrong, but when I checked on the WD site it turned out that they had deliberately added that automatic switch-on, apparently assuming that the customer would appreciate it. So this has not been carefully thought through; In any case, they have not done me any favors... And so I have no choice but to plug the adapter into the wall socket when I want to update my backup. But, as previously noted: otherwise it's a very good thing that I'm happy with.