Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I've now used this drive for about half a week and so far it is working well. It was already formatted for the Mac, so when I plugged it in there was nothing to do - it mounted automatically (I am running macOS High Sierra, version 10.13.6). I like that there is no separate power supply - it runs off of the power from the USB port. I've connected it both to USB-C on a new Mac and USB-A on an older one, and it works well on both. I am running TimeMachine backups to it, plus I also use CrashPlan and set up the drive as a local destination. In addition, I've copied some large files to a folder on the drive. I've even set up sharing for a folder on the drive to save the TimeMachine backup for another Mac on my home network (see Apple's website for how to do that - you use Sharing in System Preferences). It all works. I did have one issue: the drive has a built-in sleep timer to power down the drive when not in use. This seemed to cause a problem with TimeMachine, which failed when making a backup overnight. I suspected the sleep timer because it is a common feature on many drives, and I've found it can cause problems. I used the WD Drive Utilities app and turned off the sleep timer, and the problem with TimeMachine hasn't recurred. I suspect that the drive's sleep timer is the cause of the many complaints I've seen here about the drive failing almost immediately after the first backup. By the way, the Mac itself has a setting under Energy Saver in System Preferences to put hard disks to sleep, and that is turned on. This setting does put the drive to sleep when not in use, and TimeMachine has no problem waking it up, even when the Mac connected over the network is running a TimeMachine backup. Maybe the real problem is that the Mac's setting to put hard drives to sleep and the drive's sleep timer don't play well together. Western Digital should look into this. The drive comes with an app called WD Discovery, and with that you can download other apps, including WD Drive Utilities. Other than using WD Drive Utilities to turn off the sleep timer, I didn't want to use the other features, and I've set WD Discovery not to run when I boot up.