I did my research, like you are no doubt doing now, and made sure that this drive would meet my needs: it would have to power down when the computer was off/idle and big enough to store my data.
The hard drive is probably one of the more attractive hard drives on the market, and although it doesn’t come with a stand to place it vertically, it does stack nicely with other WD Elements drives as it’s not got a curved top and has four stable rubber feet at the bottom. The activity light is at the back of the drive and is a dull white LED which isn’t distracting and doesn’t illuminate the surroundings.
When I was shopping for a hard drive, I at first passed over the WD Elements 2TB drive as it only spins at 5400rpm rather than 7200rpm which is more common and I couldn’t work out why it was cheaper than the other drives on the market (£75 on Amazon.co.uk). I’m glad I did not as it runs very quietly – possibly due to the lower spin speed – and transfer rates don’t seem to be that different to what would be expected. HD Tune reports approximately 33MB/s average transfer rate and a seek speed of 14ms which is well within the range expected of USB 2 hard drives.
The drive comes preformatted in NTFS which gives approximately 1.81TB (roughly 1850GB). It is compatible with Mac OSX although it will need formatting prior to use.
I’ve given the Western Digital Elements 2TB External HDD a score of 4/5. I have deducted a point for it only being USB2. As USB3 is emerging, I think drives like this would benefit massively from the additional speed available with USB3. As I say, the drive’s speed is not at all crippling and well within the norm for USB2 hard drives but filling the entire 2TB is going to be painful over USB2.