I just got a brand new Passport and boy do I regret it. I would return it but I rather not deal with Best Buy, and I don’t think they have any comparable product in store right now so it’s just not worth my time to wait for it to ship. Maybe I’ll sell this one and buy a Seagate. I had no idea about this new SmartWare software, I’ve bought at least 5 WD external drives over the past few years, so I didn’t expect to have to do any new research to find out there is new software that is impossible to remove.
It’s clear that from at least a year’s worth of posts with no fix Western Digital simply does not care about their customers. So I encourage you all to stop caring about them as well and stop buying their products. Maybe then they’ll realize without customers they are nothing.
Also what were you thinking having the drive go to sleep? All other WD drives worked fine as long as you set the option in Windows to Never let hard drives sleep. Now with this one I am forced to install this software. Since I DJ, I can not afford to have the hard drive be freezing on me like that. Today while I was scratching it froze up on me (had the same 2 audio files loaded for about 10 minutes so since they were cached the drive went to sleep). I also make recordings so there’s yet another reason why I can’t let this happen. I understand I can turn off this option if I install Smartware, turn off sleep, then uninstall Smartware. I’m about to do that right now, I hope it goes smoothly. But really there is no reason why it shouldn’t just work like every other drive and follow the Windows setting.
Update: Okay nevermind I am returning this drive. I tried to install the firmware to install Smartware and it keeps saying other USB devices are plugged in. And I bought it with cash and a gift card at a Best Buy, and they don’t have any other USB powered hard drives besides Western Digitals. So who knows what they’ll let me do. [deleted] so much time wasted and now I have to wait even longer to get another drive.
