I bought a WD My Book Essential 3TB USB 3.0 to cover all by backups for the near future.
One thing I always require on a external HDD is a power button to have to unit plugged in, but turned off when I so desire.
It looked like WD offered my this, but as you all may know, the power button needs SmartWare which is a major resource hog. Me not like, but what to do? Anyone found any way around SmartWare? I malied the support and asked if there was a firmware update in the works, but tech guy said there wasn’t. He would forward my request to the dev team thou…
Is there something to be done in the meantime? I guess not, but asking is free.
I’m sorry, but you should be able to turn the power on and off WITHOUT software. And why in the world does an externsal hard drive need a bios?
I am running into that same issue. And even though I have loaded that bloatware (which acts more like spyware or a virus slowing the PC down) WD calls SmartWare, the drive lights stay on when the PC is shut off and when the PC is running the drive light goes out. I think it’s more DumbWare than SmartWare. I find I have to keep the stupid drive unplugged to solve all the issues I have with the drive. Not a very user friendly product, more of a user frustation product. I am VERY DISAPPOINTED with WD. I never thought in my life that any company could put a product out more frustrating and poorly thought out than Microsoft, but WD has managed to do so.
Hi, I have just bougth My Book and I didn’t install the software, and I found out that first I stop the disk with the task bar icon, then I press the harddisk hardware button (which is in the back) for 5 seconds, it will shut down, and keep in that way even if I restart, and pressing again the button with a fast click is enough to start the disk again. I hope I am not forcing anything, but so far it works perfectly. If I have the disk on while restarting the PC, it restarts together.
