WD 5TB Elements AE Portable External Hard Drive, USB 3.2 Gen 1

The WD Elements AE is a 2.5-inch portable mechanical hard drive from Western Digital, listed here in a 5 TB version at £155.99, with a 4.3-out-of-5 rating from 1,008 ratings. It sits at number 10 in this guide, and its listing is the one that disagrees with itself most often: three different capacities appear on the same product page.

The title says 5 TB and the Digital Storage Capacity field says 5 TB. The Hard-Drive Size field in the same listing says 2 TB. One of the bullets offers "up to 6TB capacity". Three figures, one drive. There is also a number that reads like speed but is not: "Data Transfer Rate: 5 Gigabits Per Second" is the USB 3.2 Gen 1 bus ceiling — 625 megabytes per second at the very most — and no 2.5-inch mechanical disk in this guide comes near that. Two smaller fields are worth a look as well: the colour is given as "Version 2025", which is not a colour, and the enclosure material as "Aluminum/Glass", against a bullet stating the enclosure is more than 50% post-consumer recycled plastic. Everything on this page is taken from the Amazon listing for the WD Elements AE; none of it comes from a test we ran ourselves.