I’ve just registered to let WD know that they’ve lost another customer due to the SmartWare SNAFU, poor manufacturing quality, and poor customer support.
The USB port in my drive snapped off after I bumped the cable. Rather than send my data off to who-knows-where for a repair, I figured I’d just put the drive into a new enclosure.
Can’t access my data, can’t easily claim all of the hard drive space after I’ve decided to give up on my data.
Last WD product I’ll ever buy.
You do not have to use Smartware, it’s meant to be a ‘one click solution’ back-up, not particulary good or bad, I do not use it personally as it does not meet my needs.
You cannot blame WD for the USB snapped port, however inconveient accidents do happen,
if you send it back for repair you should be back to where you were in the begining, with little or no loss of data.
Yeah, actually I can blame WD for the USB port snapping off. I opened the case and I’ve seen how cheaply made it is, and how poorly connected it was.
I’m aware that it’s supposed to be “point and click.” I’m also aware that it’s a crappy and proprietary solution, and that there are better ways to accomplish the same thing.
I finally managed to get the thing running in the external enclosure, moved a bunch of data onto the drive, rebooted, and now it’s showing unformatted.
So, not only am I unable to remove their abominable software, but apparently I can’t use the drive either since the firmware hoses the partition map somehow.
Just a truly awesome solution. Thank god I had backups.
Now I’m going outside with a sledgehammer.