Because they are so cheap, I bought several WD Elements 5TB external drives. First of all, WD promised them to be USB 3, but they’re not. Read and write speeds are extremely slow and often times they don’t even show up on USB 3 equipped Macs. Unworkable. But I also keep losing them due to failures. It starts with some files not being able to be copied, it ends with the whole disk being corrupt. So far, I have 3 drives that have stopped working, so I have lost a tremendous amount of data (work related files, photos). WD must be aware of the quality of this specific drive. Anyone else has the same problems?
I use 3 Macs: Imac 2011, Imac 2019, Macbook Air 2017. WD disk formatted APFS, HUID partition.
