Help with 1TB My Book and SmartWare

hey readers, new to the forum and hopefully can get some help!

ive had my MyBook for over a year now, and a (relevant for later maybe) WD Passport for maybe 6months. when i first bought the book, I striaght away formatted it to FAT32 to work across a couple things i had at home including xbox, PS3, brothers & others PC’s etc and never bothered installing the packaged software as i saw the main perk being backing up which wasnt important for me.

anyway, since then i’ve had a friend’s more recent WD Passport (with firewire800 and screen display if that helps) and i let it install the “WD SmartWare” software on my mac so that it could display the text on the screen including the amount of space taken up etc. later do i find that my own older passport shows up  in this software and i am excited to update it and keep it in an orderly fashion through that…

During this time my Book had been away for repairs, and now as i’ve got it back today i find that it has its own software to install, “WD Drive Manger” so i annoyingly have two softwares running for what i imagine to achieve the same purpose… ive updated both the HD’s and computer softwares to the best of my knowledge…

SO BASICALLY, Three WD external hard drives, two show up in WD SmartWare, and one which is roughly same age as the other who is working is a no show.

I guess I’m really asking if theres a way to manage all my portable HD’s with the one program or is it a generational gap no allowing or what. im not too sure or i wouldve googled a bit more but i haven’t been luck as of yet.

anyway thanks for reading my essay and look forward to responses !

Hi there and welcome!!

It is as you suspect: A generation gap.

Smartware only works with the newer drives (That come with it) and only if they are working as HFS+ (Mac) or NTFS (Windows), it does not work on FAT32 drives, it allows for both drive management and backups

The older WD drives have 2 different, separate softwares: Anywhere backups and the the drive manager, which is your drive mostly used to change the RAID on the Studio II and Mirror drives, disconnect the drive and check on the status.

As far as I know there isn’t a universal software from WD to control both the older and the newer drives at once…

ohhhhhhhk thanks for that mate :smileyvery-happy: