Ext. Hard Drive failure & success
Jun. 7th, 2010 12:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
raloriaWarning: Technical geekery & ranting below. :P
Yay! for getting a portable external hard drive that isn't filled up with software and actually works! :D
I bought a WD (Western Digital) My Essential Passport HD a few weeks ago, hooked it up to my MacBook Pro last week and not only couldn't I save anything to it (yes, I know you have to format them to work on the Mac), but I couldn't even get the software on the drive to instal! First of all, I don't even want/need software like that. I can do my own manual backups thank you very much. However, you can't get rid of this software because it's a disc drive. Grrrrrr. Anyway, it wouldn't launch anyhow and after doing research on it online, I found out people are having all sorts of trouble with the new Western Digital ext. HDs and their new software. The stuff I was reading made me even afraid to hook the drive up to my PC. So I returned it to Best Buy.
It's sad 'cause I'm a long-time WD customer. Almost all my ext. HDs are by them and some of them are many years old and still working fine. I've never had trouble with their products until now.
Once I got my money back from Best Buy I went in search of a new drive and found Iomega's eGo. It's only 500 GB to the 750 GB one by WD, but once I figured out how to format the drive on my Mac (so hopefully I should be able to use it on the PC as well), it works great! Best part? It didn't come with any software! There are instructions to download software off their site, but at least you're not forced into it taking up room on the HD and you're not paying for it to be on there. WD could take a lesson from Iomega.
I just finished copying my files from my Mac to the Iomega drive. It was 14 GB and it copied over in 12 minutes! Awesomeness! \0/
Yay! for getting a portable external hard drive that isn't filled up with software and actually works! :D
I bought a WD (Western Digital) My Essential Passport HD a few weeks ago, hooked it up to my MacBook Pro last week and not only couldn't I save anything to it (yes, I know you have to format them to work on the Mac), but I couldn't even get the software on the drive to instal! First of all, I don't even want/need software like that. I can do my own manual backups thank you very much. However, you can't get rid of this software because it's a disc drive. Grrrrrr. Anyway, it wouldn't launch anyhow and after doing research on it online, I found out people are having all sorts of trouble with the new Western Digital ext. HDs and their new software. The stuff I was reading made me even afraid to hook the drive up to my PC. So I returned it to Best Buy.
It's sad 'cause I'm a long-time WD customer. Almost all my ext. HDs are by them and some of them are many years old and still working fine. I've never had trouble with their products until now.
Once I got my money back from Best Buy I went in search of a new drive and found Iomega's eGo. It's only 500 GB to the 750 GB one by WD, but once I figured out how to format the drive on my Mac (so hopefully I should be able to use it on the PC as well), it works great! Best part? It didn't come with any software! There are instructions to download software off their site, but at least you're not forced into it taking up room on the HD and you're not paying for it to be on there. WD could take a lesson from Iomega.
I just finished copying my files from my Mac to the Iomega drive. It was 14 GB and it copied over in 12 minutes! Awesomeness! \0/
