Customer Reviews

Western Digital My Book Studio 1 TB USB 2.0/FireWire 800/400, Desktop External Hard Drive

5 star:		(35)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(27)

 

 

Having always liked Western Digital Quality, I purchased a few of these drives - and was horrified to learn that WD has chosen to pre-install a large suite of largely useless 'SmartWare' on the drive.

The problem is, it's not defeatable; it takes up disk space, but is activated in Flash - so no way to get rid of it. It robs you of a drive letter (in windows) or a drive on Mac OS X - again, without a way to get rid of it.

After weeks of complaining by users, WD issues a 'VCD' utility that allows you to 'hide' it (but not get rid of it); the zinger is that the current drives need updated firmware to run VCD - and WD has NOT published the firmware updater for Studio drives yet, hence making the former utility useless.

All in all a bad experience, a drive marred by mad design, and I for one will no longer purchase WD until they reverse this strategy of spyware on a drive that cannot be overridden. From the feedback everywhere, I assume they will get the message.

UPDATED:

The new 'info' WD had Amazon add to the line (visit support to hide VCD) is NOT true; the support site ONLY has updates for the Elite and Essential, but NOT for the Studio line yet. That means, the updater won't work, as the firmware updater required has still not been released. Check it yourself on their site; very, very poor support and misleading post

Let me echo the thoughts of some of the other reviewers here: The addition of the 'smartware' in such an intrusive way is not Mac-like and completely unnecessary. I did see the mandatory virtual CD disappear after I installed the smartware software on my Mac, but having to install anything to use an external hard drive is completely inexcusable. Western Digital loses two stars on this 'feature' alone.

Once installed, the included smartware software adds an equally unnecessary menu bar icon that does nothing but take up system resources. I was able to remove it from loading by going into user settings under system preferences and removing it from my startup items.

FEATURES & OPERATION

Beyond the major software flaw, this is a good external storage device. There are few first party firewire 800 drives directed at Mac users, so this drive might be attractive for those looking for an easy solution to adding a high-speed time machine backup drive to their system. It is also compatible with Firewire 400 and USB 2.0.

Western Digital gets points for including all the cables you'll need. A Firewire 800 cable, an 800 to 400 adapter, and a USB 2.0 cable are included in the box.

The drive has an e-ink display (similar to that of the Kindle) that details the remaining drive capacity. The display works even when the device is powered off. It unfortunately will not work until the smartware software is installed.

Transfer speed is decent and certainly faster than USB 2.0, although my first time machine backup of 600+ gigs took over five hours.

The silicon feet at the bottom are springy and make it very unstable when positioned upright. A simple nudge is enough to tip it over. I have mine safely lying flat on my desk.

CONCLUSION

External hard drives are a dime a dozen these days. I don't blame Western Digital for trying to differentiate themselves in a rather bland marketplace, but the heavy handed software installation is unnecessary.

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PROs:

A decent, fast drive in an attractive enclosure

All cables are included

Competitively priced

CONs

Heavy handed software installation that is difficult to remove

Drive prone to toppling over when standing vertically

E-ink display doesn't work until software is installed

The drive out of the box presents both a normal disk and a goofy 215MB SmartWare "virtual CD" to the OS, so the latter clutters your desktop, finder, and chooser panels. Reports are conflicting wrt whether this space is taken from disk (as I suspect), or if it's actually flash hidden inside the enclosure on the interface board.

Various articles on the web talk about disabling the SmartWare "virtual CD" and point to a WD web page that advises that one update firmware, then run a Virtual CD Manager utility that can be downloaded from them. Unfortunately, the available firmware update only applies to Essential and Elite (sic) units, not these Studio models, and the Virtual CD Manager utility reports that a firmware update is required to use it -- yet WD confirms that none is available.

OSX reports for the disk:

Total Capacity : 1.8 TB (1,999,696,297,984 Bytes)

and for the volume:

Mount Point : /Volumes/My Book Capacity : 1.8 TB (1,999,562,039,296 Bytes)

Format : Mac OS Extended (Journaled) Available : 1.8 TB (1,999,158,603,776 Bytes)

Owners Enabled : No Used : 384.7 MB (403,435,520 Bytes)

Number of Folders : 9 Number of Files:62

There's no reason to believe that this virtual CD is anything more than an annoyance, but purchasers may wish to find the previous generation disk which doesn't suffer from it, until/unless WD releases a fix.

Just received the drive. Hooked it up with Firewire to my iMac running OsX 10.6 Snow Leopard. Set up was a breeze -- I just plugged it in and connected to computer according to the instructions enclosed with the drive and it was ready to use. My iMac automatically recognized it and I was ready to use it in about 1 minute flat.

As some reviewers have noted, when the drive is connected a virtual CD icon appears on the desktop. I installed the WD software on this virtual drive in order to personalize the display on the front of the drive. The software interface is very nice and very user-friendly. However, I have not run the backup software because I elected to use Time Machine to do my backups. Time Machine backed up to the drive with no problems.

I was concerned about the virtual CD referred to by some other reviewers because I also don't like to clutter up my desktop with icons. However, I was pleased to find that removing this virtual CD is very straightforward. Just click on the WD icon that appears in the menu bar of the Finder, and select "Unmount CD" The virtual CD icon disappears and can be made to reappear at any time by clicking on the same icon and selecting "Mount CD". There is no need to download any software to do this, and no problem doing this with the My Book Studio, contrary to some previous reviews!

The drive itself feels solid. The housing is plastic, but it looks good and does not feel cheap. The drive is also fairly quiet -- certainly quieter than the Maxtor One Touch external drive that this drive has replaced -- and I like the energy saver features.

Overall I am very happy with my purchase so far and can reassure any readers out there that there is no reason to be concerned about the software or the virtual CD.

UPDATE: There is new software available for this drive that lets you completely eliminate the virtual CD. Great for those that don't like it popping up all the time. The drawback is that the virtual CD is required for drive encryption.

Pros:

Fast Firewire 800 Works with most Macs

Sleek Design

Unique Status Display

Works well, low power, low heat, and well ventilated

Cons:

Intrusive WD SmartWare software

Plastic construction instead of Aluminum

Verdict:

This hard drive works flawlessly, so I gave it 5 stars despite the intrusive software. A nice external hard drive with some unique features, but the intrusive software might bother some users. There aren't a lot of choices for Firewire 800 drives for mac users, and this is certainly a sound offering with about twice the performance of the USB 2.0 connection.

Performance:

Doing some file writes by dragging large files and folders to the HDD, the USB 2.0 write times averaged about 35 MB/s and the Firewire 800 transfer times were about 63 MB/s, so it is definitely worth using Firewire 800 over USB 2.0. Power consumption is low and the drive is reasonably quite. It has no loud fans, but you do hear regular hard drive noises.

Usage:

Why is the software intrusive? WD decided to use a "virtual CD" that mounts whenever the hard drive is mounted. Also, use of their WD SmartWare program is required to use the drive. They do provide a tool to disable their software on some drives, but that doesn't work on the My Book Studio drive.

The drive was easy to setup and came pre-formatted as OS X Journaled. All I had to do is change a couple settings so the WD SmartWare software wouldn't open every time the drive mounted and change the label on the display on the drive to what I wanted. I use it as a Time Machine drive, which is setup by running Time Machine and selecting the My Book drive as the backup drive.

The fact that I purchased a hard drive that comes with software I neither wanted nor can remove is worse than annoying. You can still use the drive, but it forces another useless, read-only drive to pop-up on your desktop. Completely useless and worthless - especially if you're using your drive for something other than back ups, or don't want to use the backup software that comes from a company that is largely in the hardware business. I mean -- it's just a disaster. Probably the advice of someone from marketing. I can't recommend this drive, especially if you are even a modestly active computer user. I know what WD is trying to do -- but they should stop that and leave the software and user experience design to the experts.

I will add my voice to the growing dissatisfaction with the unnecessary software that is forced on you by Western Digital. I mean, come on WD, this item is specifically made for Mac. Who would want to use your crappy software when Time Machine is included standard with every Mac. Yes, I read about the virtual CD and the inability to delete it before I bought this product, but it is no less annoying because I knew about it in advance. Eject it and it comes right back.

Amazon continues to publish wrong information in the description of this product...

"New Updates for WD SmartWare Software (11/16/09): This update implements customer feedback requests to: hide the Virtual CD (VCD), enhance the ability to opt-out of WD SmartWare completely, and exit WD SmartWare from the Windows system tray. Visit Western Digital Support to download your update by inputting the model number of your hard drive."

The update to disable the virtual drive on WD website specifically states "This update is not intended for My Book Studio or My Passport Studio drive".

I bought this drive because I am a photographer and needed a large capacity drive to store my photos, and I wanted a firewire 800 drive for the transfer speed. I am working with a macbook pro that I have had for 6 months. When I first bought the drive it worked fine. I won't go into the smartware software there have been enough other people giving their opinion of that. No long after I started using the drive, I would sometimes get a message saying that the drive I inserted was unreadable by the computer and gave the options to initialize, eject or ignore. If I would click ignore, the drive would then still work fine, without any problems. Yesterday, I got that same message again, but this time after I hit ignore, the drive didn't show up on my desktop. I unplugged it and tried again, and then this time hit initialize, where I was brought to the disk utility screen. I "repaired" the disk, and was able to access it again, but continued to have some problems with it, and had to repair it again. This morning, the drive seemed to connect without a problem, but when I tried to transfer photos from my memory cards onto the drive, it would give me an error. I could transfer the photos from the memory cards onto another drive, but not onto this one. I am in the process of trying to repair the drive yet again, but I would definitely advise people to avoid this drive. Fortunately, I have most of my work backed up onto other drives, but even if I get this drive working again, I don't think I could trust that it will continue to work.

Update 5-14-2010:

I was able to get everything off the drive and reformat it. At first the drive seemed to act normally again. I was going to try and use SuperDuper to backup everything from my new G_RAID drive back onto the MyBook Studio, but didn't have time and cancelled the operation. Now, the drive won't even power up, instead of a hard-drive, I've got a $200 paperweight sitting on my desk. I will never trust my data to a MyBook drive again.

Bought for the firewire interface and wanted to use as an off-site backup to my My Book Studio II. This was horrible to deal with and I've returned it. I'm a PC tech by trade and this drive is a major pain on Windows 7 64-bit. Would only seem to work OK with USB 2.0.

WD forces you to install and use their Smartware program to manage the device, and their newest firmware release does not support this model. The result is; YOU CAN NOT HIDE THE CRAPWARE PARTITION ON THIS MODEL. Smartware also doesn't seem to integrate well with their WD Drive Manager x64 software used to manage the Studio II and raid setup.

May work well for Mac users, but on a PC it would not run firewire from a brand new HP laptop, or chain off my My Book Studio II which works well with all connections.

Big disappointment and I will be reluctant to buy another WD external now.

I'm very grateful to Amazon for their top-notch service in facilitating the return.

I installed the WD last night and the system recognized it immediately. As a test I was able to drag and drop files with no problem. Looking good so far. Next came the test that I purchased the drive for: Time Machine. Time Machine recognized the drive immediately (running Snow Leopard on an iMAC). The full backup started running nicely then stopped after about 24gb with a message saying the drive had an error or had been ejected. It was still there in Finder and I was able to drag and drop files as before. I fired up the Time Machine backup again and off it went. It got past the previous error spot and backed up another 20gb or so then failed again.

After some searching I found Apple support article TS1550 that instructed me to erase and re-partition the drive using a GUID partition scheme. This was my first time to use Disk Utility and that seemed to fix the problem. I backed up about 250gb in what seemed about 90 minutes.

My next battle is that pesky WD Smartware that won't drop off Finder, even if ejected. Why do these hardware vendors think we want this stuff?

1/30/2009 update: How to remove the Virtual CD (VCD) on the Mac? see [...]