I can remember a few years ago when I was looking for a much larger external hard drive to use for my editing scratch drive. I'd just signed on to shoot and edit for a locally produced reality show and I knew I'd need a lot more space. After comapring many, many drives I came across a new Western Digital drive. It had everrything I wanted and more. 2 terabytes of storage capacity, a separate power source, and multiple file system options. It even had the ability to play on an HDTV straight off the hard drive. I figured I'd found the perfect drive. Damn was I wrong.
Right from the beginning this Ning was annoying. A many drives do now, it came bundled with its own software. This software was not only completely useless to me, but it took awhile to load and the problem is that until the software fully loads, the storage drive won't appear. This means that when I start the computer up, it's a little whole before the drive even loads...
Secondly, the software and firmware were all on the drive itself, no disc, meaning that if the thing went bad I couldn't just re-install the software. I figured it was no big deal though so I pressed on.
A couple of weeks ago the computer started acting really slow. I literally spent weeks pouring over support knowledge bases and tech support trying to figure out the problem. It came to a head when a DVD project which should have taken about two hours to burn was on track for two weeks. I stopped everything and transferred all the necessary files to the desktop and unplugged the thing. I rebooted and the computer was running like new!
In a nutshell, what I'm saying is don't buy the Western Digital My Book drives. Practically everyone on the message boards was having issues and all Western Digital techs would tell them is replace the drive. Well, that may not be so bad except it seems like everyone was having issues with these drives. Last time I checked, a sensible company would issue a voluntary recall or at least offer up a firmware/software update to handle the problem, but no. WD did no such thing. Another thing that really bothered me about this whole thing is that Western Digital offers no data recovery services. Not even under their warranty. My advice, If you're looking for a drive to keep large working files in, get an internal Serial ATA or comparable. If you need an external drive, go with a Seagate. I've had one for years and that thing's a beast. No problems and no additional software.
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