My personal opinion, based on twenty years in the computer graphics industry, is that I will never purchase any WD products again. This whole saga speaks of a customer hostile attitude which I can well do without.
There are plenty of other manufacturers out there who provide external hard drives which allow you to back up your data how you like, and to format and partition your disk how you like. (LaCie have been producing hard drives for years and I have used them without an issue).
Firstly, forcing the user to have to mount an undeletable partition is rude and bad business practice. From a technical point of view, I don’t even have words to describe the fact that the partition on the Studio version can’t even be disabled - let alone removed completely (not that it should have even been there in the first place). I have been getting constant errors as my system struggles to deal with this rogue partition.
Secondly, the WD Smartware software is awful IMO. Even if the partition didn’t steal space from the hard disk and force users to mount this software every time they want to use the disk, I wouldn’t use this software.
All that is needed to back up a Mac is an external hard disk with a Firewire or USB2 connection. You don’t need time machine to back up an older Mac, you can simply drag and drop the files across. If you want to automate the process, there are free products like Carbon Copy Cloner - which can do incremental timed backups. Or other paid for products like SuperDuper. versiontracker.com should have both of these.
