{"id":1302,"date":"2010-03-22T00:01:55","date_gmt":"2010-03-22T08:01:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=1302"},"modified":"2010-03-21T13:17:35","modified_gmt":"2010-03-21T21:17:35","slug":"im-peeved-at-western-digital","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=1302","title":{"rendered":"I’m Peeved at Western Digital"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"
\nI was once a fan, a huge fan of Western Digital’s My Book line of external hard drives. I wrote about them in my books. I’ve praised them on this blog. Never again.
\n
\nLast week my Mac’s external backup drive died. It had over 2 years of Time Capsule backups. Gone it was, in an instant. That’s the way hard drives die sometimes: A series of Time Capsule errors, then the drive was gone, gone, gone.<\/p>\n

I bought a replacement drive, a Western Digital My Book external, a 1.5TB drive to replace the 1TB drive that died. I also bought three more WD external drives for other computers in my office, also to be used as backup drives.<\/p>\n

After installing the first WD My Book, I noticed something annoying on the screen. It was a phantom CD-ROM drive.<\/p>\n

There was nothing about the phantom CD-ROM drive in the external drive’s documentation or packaging. There was no file folder on the hard drive either.<\/p>\n

No, it turns out that Western Digital puts the phantom CD-ROM drive software on the external drive’s firmware<\/em>, i.e., on the ROM chips that control the drive’s hardware. And they provide no method for you to disable that software.<\/p>\n

I tried dragging the phantom CD-ROM drive to the Trash on the Mac, which should eject the drive. No dice: The drive came back. Again and again, like an unwanted cat.<\/p>\n

The offensive software WD uses is called WD smartdrive<\/em>. You should Google that sometime. You’ll find forum after forum of users complaining angrily.<\/p>\n

To rid my external hard drive of the software, I had to download a firmware upgrade. Then I had to download a patch that merely turned off the offensive software. You see, you can’t really get rid of it. You can’t even low-level format the drive, because the software is hardcoded in ROM, not on the drive itself.<\/p>\n

The process to remove WD smartdrive occupied an hour of my time,but remember that I bought four<\/em> of the drives. So I returned three of them back to the store.<\/p>\n

I also fired off an angry letter at Western Digital, announcing that there was no way I would ever write about their products in my books again.<\/p>\n

When I want external storage, I want external storage<\/em>. I don’t want a program I cannot remove or disable.<\/p>\n

I’ll let you know whether Western Digital responds to my angry letter. My guess is that, given their arrogance with the damn WD smartdrive software in the first place, the won’t bother. We’ll see.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was once a fan, a huge fan of Western Digital’s My Book line of external hard drives. I wrote about them in my books. I’ve praised them on this blog. Never again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1302"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1302\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1318,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1302\/revisions\/1318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}