Q: Is a WD Red drive inside this disk? I saw this in the comments of the other guest but I did not find it in the product description,

A: There are WD Red drives inside with NASware 3.0. Be sure you get the drive manufactured in Thailand not China. The Thailand drives have a 256mb cache and the China ones are allegedly only 128mb. I found this out from a YouTube video by JDM_WAAT published on 7/26/2017 titled "Western Digital Easystore 8TB (WD Red inside) unboxing and shucking. I verified the 256mb cache on my Thailand drive (WD80EFAX-68LPHN0). The video shows how to open the enclosure without breaking it and shuck the drive in great detail. A+ would shuck again.

Q: I have a 931g passport that is full. I cannot access individual files ,pics and folders at my leisure. The only thing it does is backup and restore period, Does the new 8T allow you to browse thru files and folders you've backed up and pick & restore?

A: Whether or not you can access individual files and folders is not a function of any particular drive. It is a function of the software you are using to back up your files with.

Q: Will this work on a PlayStation 4?

A: Yes it does. That's what I bought it for.

Q: What is the difference between the WD Easy-store 8TB and the WD My-book 8TB? Trying to figure out why the easy-store is more expensive. Thanks

A: The drives used. This one has a red NAS, while the other ones use, most likely, a WD blue. The easy-store is better for long-term storage.

Q: Can hook this up to my Xbox one?

A: Most likely. According to Microsoft, the max amount of usb storage on an Xbox one is 16tb, in any combination. So a single 8tb drive should work fine.

Q: Is the power adapter for this drive a power strip–friendly sideways brick like the recent My Book drives, or is it a long brick designed for vertical wall outlets that covers up 2 extra slots on a standard power strip if not installed on the end?

A: It is power-strip and outlet friendly (usable on top socket of the wall outlet without covering the bottom outlet).

Q: I bough 2 drives because I read that they were red drives inside, when I took them out one of the drives is red and the other one isn't. what's going on?

A: Western Digital has been transitioning these drives to 'White' labeled drives. They seem to be functionally identical to reds, but were likely labelled differently so people could not re-sell the drives as reds. The only catch is that you may have a 3.3v pin problem that will prevent the drive from booting, but that can easily be solved with some tape. Poke around on www.reddit.com/r/datahoarder and you'll see what I mean.

Q: Is it possible to use this (or similar external hard drives) to store and view movies, connected directly to a smart tv by the usb connection?

A: It's possible, but you'd likely need to make sure the drive is formatted with a file system your TV understands. Pretty much all of them support FAT-32. Windows arbitrarily doesn't give an option to use FAT-32 when formatting drives / partitions greater than 32GB capacity. Microsoft/Windows is really just trying to force their proprietary NTFS file system on you, even in situations where FAT-32 would work fine. The actual partition size limit of FAT-32 is 2TB (2,048 GB), which a third-party formatting utility can do just fine. So that means you'd still basically need to make multiple partitions to use all the capacity of your drive and have a file system that the TV can read. It's possible some TVs may be confused by that, but most would handle it fine. exFAT extends the established FAT file system to overcome some of its inherent limitations. For a drive with this capacity, exFAT is probably the best file system to use if you want to use the drive with your TV and other non-Windows devices. Among non-Windows devices, it has much better support than NTFS. You can make a single large 8TB partition formatted with the exFAT file system and it's very likely your TV will be able to use it. If your TV doesn't work with that, make a 2TB partition and format it with the FAT-32 file system.