Luis Caffesse
Admin
Just a friendly warning to all of you - I've bought Western Digital drives for years upon years... but I think I'm done now.
Just bought a 2TB drive (along with a couple of mobile 500gb drives) and am a bit surprised by their latest move. The drives have always come with their own WD backup software, which I always promptly deleted. No big deal, until now.
The latest generation of WD external drives are actually partitioned, and their "SmartWare" software in built into the firmware of the drive. And of course, this isn't explained anywhere on the packaging.
Long story short - you cannot get rid of the software or the partition it's on, you can only disable it - but it will always be there eating up space. So even though you bought a 2TB, 1TB, or 500GB drive, a few hundred MBs of that space is already taken up for you and cannot be used.
Given that every major OS already has built in backup and restoring tools that are much better than anything WD includes on its drive, this seems ridiculous to me. But more importantly, if I buy something based on the space its advertised at, I think I should have every reasonable expectation to use that amount of space.
So just FYI - if you buy a new WD external drive, don't expect to actually get access to the amount of space they claim to be selling you.
Anyhow - until they change this approach I won't be buying anymore WD drives (and I'm going to see if I can possibly return the ones I just bought).
So - anyone have a suggestion to me as to what kind of externals I should be looking at instead?
Just bought a 2TB drive (along with a couple of mobile 500gb drives) and am a bit surprised by their latest move. The drives have always come with their own WD backup software, which I always promptly deleted. No big deal, until now.
The latest generation of WD external drives are actually partitioned, and their "SmartWare" software in built into the firmware of the drive. And of course, this isn't explained anywhere on the packaging.
Long story short - you cannot get rid of the software or the partition it's on, you can only disable it - but it will always be there eating up space. So even though you bought a 2TB, 1TB, or 500GB drive, a few hundred MBs of that space is already taken up for you and cannot be used.
Given that every major OS already has built in backup and restoring tools that are much better than anything WD includes on its drive, this seems ridiculous to me. But more importantly, if I buy something based on the space its advertised at, I think I should have every reasonable expectation to use that amount of space.
So just FYI - if you buy a new WD external drive, don't expect to actually get access to the amount of space they claim to be selling you.
Anyhow - until they change this approach I won't be buying anymore WD drives (and I'm going to see if I can possibly return the ones I just bought).
So - anyone have a suggestion to me as to what kind of externals I should be looking at instead?
