Nothing but trouble! WD My Book Essential 1.5TB USB 2.0 3.5" External Hard Drive

WD External and Portable SSD External SSD for Windows
1

I thought 1.5TB for $60 was a deal. Boy was I wrong.

The drive is fine… what I was unaware of was the insane software WD forces you use in order to access the drive!!!

I WANT YOUR SOFTWARE GONE!!!

It’s been slowing my PC down to a crawl. I know this because when I killed the WD tasks in Task Manager… all of sudden my system started forking at normal speed again.

I also wanted a simple external  drive to put files on SO I COULD TAKE THEM WITH ME!!!

Suprise!!! Every machine I want to access MY files on has to have your **bleep** software installed OR I CAN’T ACCESS MY FILES!!!

What was the point?!?!?!

I want a firmware update to make your drive behave like a normal external NTFS hard drive!!! That means NO TRACKING! NO PROTECTING!!! I WANT NONE OF YOUR “SECURITY” FEATURES!!!

I will NEVER buy a WD drive again because of this. There are standars in the computer industry for a reason.

An External HD should need no software to be accessed from any system.

2

Uninstall the Smartware it’s not needed and don’t bother with the firmware update.

Joe

1 Like
3

Thanks. I did uninstall it. But the drive still won’t show up on my XP laptop. Shows up fine on the machine I first installed it on though.

4

Is the XP up to date with SP3? Did you load the SES driver when the prompt came up? Make sure you’re not using a hub to connect the drive.

Joe

5

Well… now I’m stuck. My PC died.

The only one that my MY BOOK seemed to work with.

I working with a Mac, a Windows 7 Machine, and of course my XP laprop.

Yes, everything is the latest.

Why when I move a drive from one system to another is there ANYTHING that prevents it for being recognized?

6

A drive is formatted NTFS for Windows will be read only on a Mac. Was the drive in original format or did you reformat it? There is a minor difference in the way XP and Vista and Windows format. I’m not an expert it might be something sector size. Using an external drive on mutiple systems seems to cause more problems for some reason. Try burning  Linux Live CD and boot from that and see if that will recognize the drive and let you recover data.

Joe