Background:
I recently decided that it was far past time for me to store my game library offline. (I've long had multiple secure backups for medical/egal/financial/family stuff).

I settled on the WD "My Passport" 4T HDD, not because it was the best, but because it hit the sweet spot on price/performance/reliability.

Price: I got a name brand, well-rated, 4T drive for $80 USD. My best bargain of the year, so far.

Physical: Smaller than a deck of cards, doesn't heat, virtually silent, barely vibrates. Sturdy and well-constructed. It loses a point because it has no skid-pads or feet, so it's prone to slide. I put four micro-dots of silicon caulking on the bottom, now it stays put.

Performance: I knew going in that a mid-range HDD couldn't compete on bitrate with my internal SSD. My plan was for this to be backup only, and load games I was playing onto my laptop. I wasn't wrong, but performance is better than I expected. Except for a few of my AAA titles, everything plays fine straight from the HDD. Bioshock Infinite and Batman: Arkham Asylum I noticed the lag. But Assassin's Creed played smooth as hot butter.

Peace of mind: Perfect solution? Hardly. Unless you consider perfect the thing that you can accomplish and meets your needs without busting the bank. Like everything else in life, this is a compromise, and one, that on the balance, I'm glad I made.

They are really nice little drives for portability. I have 2 4tb ones and one 1tb one. They are reasonably fast as storage. I would never use external drives for running anything, whilst usb 3 is quite fast, it is nothing in the realms of good ssd. But as reasonable large drives which you can pop in your pocket they are a great idea.
As mentioned on the other posts. 1 drive is a risk. Even the best drives can fail or lose sectors. Multiple copies is the best way. Also if you want large scale storage you can bulk buy 4 or 6tb and then raid them together. For a few hundred you get massive storage with a drive failover.

Disagree that "My Passport" is "brand name, well-rated." That's actually a trash tier drive.

WD Black would be "brand name, well-rated," but not "My Passport."

Nonsense. WD have loads of lines, Elements, Passport, red, black etc. all for different purposes. WD black is a performance drive, not me I would expect to use for backup - ie speeds are not the main concern but long term security. Red are for NAS. So each of the drives has its purpose. Passport is as small as possible for easy transport (so I agree not the best idea for backup, but they are cheap).

Cheaping on a hard drive is the last place you want cheap on, because if it fails you lose your data. If a power supply, a GPU, ram or whatever fails, you can just replace it, you can't replace personal data.

As far as I know they used to put WD Reds in their MyBooks/Elements Desktop until recently, when people started to buy the MyyBook to crack it open and use the drive for their computer as is was a cheaper way to get the WD Reds.

To address the OPs topic: I had the same problem some time ago and was looking for a new drive to back up data. I had an eye on mobile USB solutions, but after a mobile WD USB hard disk broke down after 6 months at work I decided to go for normal back up hard disk size.

I read some reddit threads, visited some web pages and read about the above mentioned drive changes in the WD MyBooks/WD Elements series. Sadly I do not have the links anymore.

In the end I bought a WD Elements Desktop.

They maybe cheaper, but if you not write to them as backup they should last. As I say, have three of these for many years and the missus has one as well. Not regular use, but perhaps monthly or so, ever had any isssue. Better to buy two cheaper ones and have redundancy, than one more expensive one which may/may not be better. Do agree with the sentiment, I have at least 10 copies, probably more.

Any reason in particular, why all this couldn't be packed into a single thread?

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/take_pity_on_my_terabytes (created three days ago)

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/backing_up_my_game_library_best_practices (created two days ago)

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/first_thoughts_on_western_digital_my_passport_4t_external_hdd (created 17 hours ago)

Yeah, we gladly helped him, but he's monopolizing the forum a bit too much for this personal matter.. just keep it in 1 thread, dude.

I have one of each HDD, a 4TB WD Elements and 4TB WD My Passport. Both work great for the purpose I bought them for, backing up my digital pc games. I only use them once every few months for backups of new games or updates to existing ones. The wear and tear shouldn't be an issue. The test of time on components, is another matter and I have no clue. :)

Also, I do have a dual hard case to protect them just in case and helps to keep the cables in one place. Best $5 investment! And the price you mentioned seems really good too.

As for WD form factor, I like the smooth shape and texture of the Elements one than the unusual dual texture of the My Passport (back when I bought them, maybe changed now?), but each one fits in the palm of my hands. A lot of storage space given for a tiny bit of storage space taken. (was that a pun? no idea lol)
. That's a good point, even I only check my front door no more than 2 times to make sure it's locked (once in a while 3 times, I'm getting old). =(

Maybe he's getting old too and forgot he made other threads? =P
.

Most brand name external drives are usually pretty reliable, and I know that because I have many and have read studies.

But in the end it really boils down to usage, and any drive can die any time ... cheap or expensive.

If a drive is for personal use and you are just backing up data to it and not constantly overwriting or replacing that data, then there is no need to go overboard with an expensive drive or a NAS.

There are companies out there who have used thousands of drives for storage of all sorts of data, every type, who have done studies on the drives, and it makes interesting reading.

One of the things I came away with, is treat your drive with care and the odds are it will last a long time.

One aspect of that, is not copying too much data to a drive all in one go. In other words control how much it heats up, and despite the claims they do heat up considerably ... just they have gotten better with the heat not being so obvious on newer drives.

Another is impact or vibrations while the drive is either running or still hot.

And always be careful with the connectors of course. Nothing is worse than a perfectly good drive becoming rubbish because the built-in USB connector has been damaged.

P.S. I am mostly talking standard mechanical HDD not SSD.

Hi, I recently bought exactly this hard drive and finally i´ve completed a full backup of my gog games! :)

Now i have a 1 TB disc with the most valuable games for me (i have 653 games on gog and more than 400 in this hdd), a PC with the same capability with games installed and gog downloads and a 3rd disc (4TB) with all the backups.

Windows games: 100%.
Goodies: all except the .flac soundtracks if there are a .mp3 version.
Linux versions: only a few of them, the games i could run in a pc with lubuntu system i have, mostly adventure games pixel art.
Demos: nope, sorry.
Mac: i don´t use, so 0%.

With 4tb i´ve only used 2 of them so i don´t need to erase old versions from now.

i thought everybody already did this by default. i have already have around 4 hard drives full of backups from gog, steam and origin(root folder copied)