I made an observation in the WD “Dashboard” app today. I’m a perfectionist, so I am a little disappointed and decided to write about it, in hope that someone responsible at WD will read it.
I have several partitions, including partition G, on a WD Red 4 TB HDD, GPT.
I have a partition K on a WD Caviar Black 1 TB HDD, MBR.
I have the partitions L and M on a second WD Caviar Black 1 TB HDD, GPT.
I most recently added a WD SSD as my C system disk, the WD Black SN850X 1 TB SSD, GPT.
When I view them in the app, they appear as K, G, M, and C. I found this a bit confusing, thinking that the app didn’t find all the drives. But then I realized that it’s just using a single drive letter for each item in the menu, one for each drive, ignoring the other drive letters.
It seems to pick up on the last drive letter, so if a drive has two partitions L and M, it will appear as M. But if it has three, or four, or more drive letters, then it seems to get confused and picks up a drive letter at random. In my case, I have 9 partitions at the moment, and it picked up on drive letter G. I’m not sure why. The last two partitions were added after Dashboard app was installed, but it still didn’t pick up on what was the last drive letter prior to installing the software, which would have been drive letter I (no not me, “I” as in "I:\" ). So I have given that a thought too! It seems to be picking up on these at random. I just hope it sticks to whatever it has decided to use, so it stays the same between power cycles - I haven’t tested this to verify that it does.
Why not display all drive letters though? Even if a single hard drive has 2, 3, 4, or even 9 partitions? I have many partitions, yes. Don’t you? I don’t see Windows or Task Manager complaining when it prints out "Disk 2 (L: M:)". Especially if you have not labeled your partitions properly like I have (e.g. Photos (WD Black 2)), identifying it in the Dashboard software by one of those drive letters that are hidden from view is made unnecessarily difficult.
So if WD would kindly fix this up, at the expense of slightly less clean and sexy (and also empty) GUI, someone here will very much appreciate that.
Have you opened a Support Case? If not opened, for more information, please contact the WD Technical Support team for the best assistance and troubleshooting:
I don’t need troubleshooting assistance, and I don’t need information. This is just feedback, and it’s for the software, not for hardware. Do you have a contact form or email address for feedback so I can send it to the right people at WD?
I looked at that contact form again. But I could not find a fitting category.
“Warranty & Replacement” is wrong.
“Troubleshooting” is wrong.
“Specification and Documents” is wrong.
“Delete Western Digital Account (non GDPR)” is wrong.
“WD Store” is wrong.
All these options require me to provide a product category as well, sometimes in addition to a serial number. Why do you need my serial number for me to tell you what’s wrong with your software, or to suggest an improvement, or to report a bug? You want my social security number too?
My new SSD is not registered to my account. None of my WD hard drives are registered. I purchased a new WD Red Plus last week and I will not register it. That’s not necessary unless I need to troubleshoot something and contact support about it, or to make a warranty claim. I will do that when that time comes.
Can I use “Presale and General Information” category? This also seems like a wrong category, since I am not looking to ask questions before I buy, and I’m not asking for any information. I’m simply providing feedback on your product, and not on the hardware but on the software that’s used by more than one hardware product.
It seems WD has no option for user/customer feedback (complaint/praise). How do you learn then? From support tickets, warranty claims and market research? Because WD knows better than the customer what the customer wants? From my perspective, you have this backwards. I personally choose function over form any day of the year. I am always open to new ideas from customers and I try my best to understand their complaints, even if they are sometimes unfounded or unreasonable. I believe we all have something to learn from each other, and no product is ever perfect.
I suspect that riyan_shaik is a bot. He/she/it will never respond to any direct question, at least not that I’ve seen. That’s WD’s “customer experience ecosystem”.
What does that say about this “community” then? Over the last couple of weeks, I have only been in contact with two real people, and you’re one of them.
I remember this place when there was a lot more activity. I created my account in 2014. I don’t think it even ran on Discourse software back then. I can hardly believe it’s been 10 years…
I started posting here again because I had questions/issues related to WD products, and I’m disappointed at the lack of interest and know-how on other forums. It’s a generational shift, and a sad ending to an era.
Big corporations have acquired and took over many of the important names in independent web forums, where people went to get real tech support that didn’t cost anything. Now it’s only about harvesting data, both public and private, and building Large Language Models on that data, and selling the freely provided useful information and expertise for a profit. I’m disgusted by their display of greed.
And then you have these “community” forums that are hosted and run by the companies themselves. Where you can have bots and employees steer the discourse (pun on Discourse) in a direction that benefits their own agenda, controlling and removing content they don’t like and suggesting that users take the discussion private where it doesn’t benefit the “community” at large.
But anyway… so what else is new!? Haha! Yeah, I get that reference; they don’t.
As to why WD has chosen not to show all drive letters in Trashboard Dashboard? I’m afraid it’s only because they can. They don’t need any other reason. It’s their software, and that’s reason enough. Well… technically it was SanDisk’s software – it was previously known as SanDisk SSD Dashboard – but since WD had the money, they acquired SanDisk, and this makes it their software now.
This is not the only issue I have come across with WD Dashboard, and it wasn’t all that great during SanDisk ownership either. Software in general is undervalued among hardware makers. This is evident in a lot of different ways.