An Open Letter to WD on the subject of My Passport HDDs

WD External Drives WD Portable Drives
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Hi, I’ve been a user of WD HDDs for almost 25 years and I’ve been extremely happy with them. I have been happy with the hardware, more or less happy with the software and quite happy with the web site and the support. In the past few years I have bought six My Passport drives. I am in need of about two more drives per year due to heavy backups so I was just about to purchase a new one when I learned that My Passports have permanent USB interface in order to reduce the size of the disk. Who the heck cares about the little bit of space gained in exchange for ruining an HDD? When I purchased those drives (and I am thankfully very happy with their performance so far, knock knock on the wood) I, like everybody else, assumed them to be normal SATA drives that can be reused if need be in other ways. I trust that every user assumes this, because that’s the way everybody else does it and because WD does not warn about this anywhere. All you had to do was use it for your marketing e.g. “Custom interface makes our drives the smallest on the market”. Such claim would make common user buy and advanced user consider. I believe that this fact was hidden from users by your sales department on purpose. “The drives look smaller so people will obviously tend to buy them on the visuals alone. Why would they buy a competion which is bigger. Let the user find out about the drawbacks later.” I believe this was the logic of your sales department. I used to work in advertising myself. When it comes to my six portable drives, although I am very happy with how they work so far, I feel cheated by WD. It is my view that you have lied to me in order to make me buy. You may question the word “lie” but to me “hiding important facts so the assumption is different” and “giving wrong facts so the assumption is different” is the same thing because the result is not the truth. I am never going to trust WD again. I will certainly buy your internal HDDs as long as they keep their quality, which I’ve been very happy with so far. I will be very carefull about buying any of your product that I cannot check directly though such as portable drives. I have already bought a competing drive for my new portable. I am also going to alter my reviews of My Passports on my reseller’s web site (which is incidentally the biggest reseller in Czech) and I will also try to squeeze the information to Amazon, although I did not purchase from them. Thank you for all your great drives, thank you for about 23 years of great companionship, shame on you for cheating me about My Passports. Karel

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karelt, please check your private messages.