Purchased two of these WD Blue 8 TB drives recently. The second one took almost a month to get here but it finally arrived. Both drives are working flawless so far. I don't intend to use these for gaming or consistent drive activities. Only purchased as storage drives where I can free up my NVMe SSD drives for mission critical operations.
The drives must be formatted as GPT drives so you can access the full drive capacity. If you format it as an MBR drive it will only show up as a 2 TB because that's the limitations imposed upon you by the MBR standard. Once you initialize the drive as GPT, you should format it as required. These WD Blue drives yields 7.28 TB of drive space total after it's formatted in it's entirety. Don't forget to assign a drive letter or it may not show up on your screen.
I purchased the "ORICO 3.5 USB C 3.1 Hard Drive Enclosure" for the secondary drive so I can use it as an external backup drive. It allows the WD Blue drive to work at it's maximum potential speed of 6Gbps via a 3.1 USB port. Most of the other drive enclosures operate at 3.0 speeds and would make drive backups slower than necessary on a 5640 RPM drive.
With that said, I highly recommend these WD Blue drives for passive backup storage. Don't know if you should be using these for gaming and such. There is a reason they offer a WD Black drive for such activities.
| Hard Drive | 4 TB Mechanical Hard Disk |
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