Having had lots of problems with my WD Studio’s installation of WD Smartware on XP SP3, with the program crashing and corrupting my device drivers, and the disk not being recognized on USB 2.0, I thought a better approach might be to try and update the firmware of the disk. Guess what, the firmware updater fails to find the disk when it scans. Has anybody actually successfully managed to do this, and if so, what is the secret? I’ve tried moving to different USB ports etc. How can I update the firmware if the updater does not work? How can I update Smartware if I cannot update the firmware, as instructed on the WD support page?
To be honest, I consider this a real disaster, if I can’t trust my WD to work properly! It’s supposed to be a backup disk, for pity’s sake. A USB drive is supposed to be the ultimate plug and play device, that’s the whole point of an external disk. I shouldn’t have to install a dedicated client program to use it properly, even less so a client program that is unreliable and unstable. I have bought many WD disks in the past, but can’t see myself doing it again, not after all this hassle! Whoever thought up this WD Smartware software seriously needs to have their head examined! It is quite literally a mental idea!
I wouldn’t even try on firmware update if the drive not behaving properly. WD external drives do not need any WD device driver to work on USB. Windows native drivers does the job. (Only SES driver is provided if the drive is equipped with hardware encryption). If the drive is new, try to get a replacement or refund.
So I have a warranty replacement disk now. Delighted to find out I have to pay out of ny own pocket to send the original one back to them.
The firmware upgrade gets a little further - the firmware installer finds the disk after scanning, but then subsequently the firmware updater seems to have hung - I get no percentage completed, just an instance of WDApplication.exe steadilt eating up memory. How long should this take? What is the installer doing, waiting for a web service or something - are ther firewall issues associated with this ?
Is WD on a commercial suicide mission with this generation of Studio disks, nothing seems to work at all. The only reason I want to update the firmware is because the latest version apparently lets you disable WD Smartware, which unfortunately has the lovely habit of crashing my XP PC. (And its not the computer, everything else runs on it absolutely fine thankyou WD).
Please advise - if I shutdown or close WDapplication.exe will the new disk be ruined?!
I can’t believe I am having so much trouble with a USB external disk - the whole idea is that they are supposed to be plug and play! Never again WD!
