……this time the fail belongs to Western Digital.
I’ve been after an external hdd for while now, my options are limited due to me wanting Firewire 800. So as I should be getting some expenses paid back soon I decided to hit Barclaycard.
The latest fail is the WD My Book Studio (Mac Edition – though it seems the fail isn’t just confined to the Mac version of this drive). So is it a bag of crap?, no the drive is quite a nice neat small drive. Seems to be fairly quiet. But the problem is with the software. WD have installed some software called WD Smartware. It offers a Time Machine type backup (pointless on the Mac as we have erm Time Machine), it also mounts a Virtual CD every time you boot it. The latter is my big issue, I don’t want that virtual crap appearing every time.
I don’t want WD Smartware installed, but I can delete this quite easily. However the Virtual CD keeps coming back every reboot. Apparently it’s the herpes of software, you just can’t get rid of it. Well you can get shot of it quite easily. Tomorrow (once the HDD is formatted – using the 7 Pass secure erase) it’ll be going back to the Apple Store. I have 14 days to return it, which I will do.
One day I will find an IT related purchase* that doesn’t need to be returned.
* excludes the ‘used’ Magic Mouse I got from John Lewis (£45) as is appears to work fine. Anyway it’s a mouse, it does mouse things well, that said it was returned by someone so maybe they found a fault. Though after a few hours the battery life has dipped from 72% to 62%, so maybe that’s another purchase to go back.
/update: Seems the application has knackered Appleshare on my Mac (means I can no longer connect to my MacMini webserver via afp://)
/update2: After tonights apple security update my Mini no longer boots. Not entirely sure who is blame, but it’s coincidental that after using the woe that was WD Smartware things started to go wrong. After all I’m currently using my MacBook which also had the same system update applied, but crucially didn’t have WD Woeware installed.