I bought a My Book Essential 1TB External Hard Drive on New Year’s Day. I was sorely disappointed to find that it included a “virtual CD” drive that cannot be removed-- (it can only be ‘disabled’, but doing so merely makes it inaccessible, leaving traces of the drive in the registry, Disk Management, and other areas of the computer).
The reason I was most disappointed was that the box contained no information that would inform customers that this drive contained something akin to a rootkit-- i.e., an unremovable feature built into the drive itself. I read *everything* on the box before plunking down my hard-earned money, but there was no mention whatsoever of the nature of this ‘feature’.
I only sought out a Western Digital external drive because I had had a great experience with one I purchased half a year ago.
The store from which I bought this will allow me to return it; and when I asked if they carried a “clean” external drive of the same capacity – one which would install no unremovable drives or software, I was given the name of another brand. For me, this is both good news and bad news: I’m elated that I will not have lost any money; but I’m unhappy because I would have preferred to exchange the drive with another Western Digital… my last WD drive was wonderful.
Please, WD, please offer your users clean drives to those of us who neither want / need extra software, etc. And just as importantly, please post _ clear _ information on the box that lets us know what to expect from your product, so we can make informed decisions during our purchase.
It’s not always convenient to spend gas & time to return a product simply because we were never told what we were getting in the first place.
When many of us use external drives, we simply want a clean, clear place in which to backup files.
Nothing more.
