I just purchased this drive. Its amazing how small, and quiet it is. I have a imac, and have already changed the partition settings to allow it to back up correctly. I was surprised that WD didn’t include info, on how to do this. At first I just hooked i up, and it appeared to work great. Luckily, I did some investigating about it, before I had problems. Anyway, I know that you can set up a password for the drive. It is so small (wallet size), a person ould just easily take it. I am physically disabled, and live in subsidized housing. The only reason that I mention this is because maintenance has a key, and things have been stolen before. I’d really hate, for this $150 drive, to quickly be placed in a pocket, and stolen. Although I really don’t have any foolproof way around this, if the drive was locked, then at least they woudn’t benefit from the theft. I could even place a sticker on the drive indicating that it was password protected, making theft less of an issue. I downloaded the pdf user manual. Apparently it is done by changing the backup software settings. Unfortunately I can not seem to find a way to acess them. Can they only be accessed, when you first plug it in? I thought that might bbe the problem, and I may have missed setup step. So I emptied and reformated the drive, turned off the mac, and unplugged the drive. I restarted my mac, plugged the drive back in, but unfortunately I still didn’t see the Smartware Settings Screen. It is backing up, based on my time machine preferences, but I can see no way to change the settings in the drive itself.
Thankyou Oxter for moving my post into the correct forum. I called support today. I have a month free. Apparently not only do you need to reformat, but you also need a program named SmartWare to allow for changes to be made, like adding passwords. This information would have made today, run a lot smoother. Especially when the box said it was quick and easy to do. I still am having trouble creating a password though. I made one, and while I was then typing in my password hint ,the screen simply closed. I tried twice more. I shut my computer down, both times, and reformatted the drive, as if I was starting anew. The first time the screen closed even faster. The second time I managed to create one, but when I clicked accept or finish, I heard a noise that my computer makes, when something is invalid. I am completely lost, and am thinking that I might just return this product to the store. Yes it is small, quiet, and powerful, but if it doesn’t do everything what it is advertised to do, then I kind of feel gipped.
Can someone please reply! Two weeks,and no reply. I made a huge mistake when I downloaded smartware. I am very partial to the iMacs program time machine. It sure would have been nice, if when I decided to purchase the drive, it would have mentioned the smartware download being nescessay to set a password. If it had, then I wouldn’t have purchased it. All that I read on the Internet, are bad reviews of this software. That’s probably why it wasn’t mentioned. I have corectly partitioned the drive, as Mac OS extended journaled. It backs up to time machine for a day or two, then it either dismounts or fails to contiue backing up. When I phone Western Digital, they tell me the problem is Time Machine. When I phone Apple, they claim it is the drives fault. Well guess what, Apple has always worked great for me, and I really think it has something to do wt the Smartware download. I really think that smartware is still hiding, somewhere on my computer or hard drive., even though I uninstalled it. I really should have purchased a Seagate drive. How do I get this drive to operate wt Time Machine? I don’t even care about a password anymore. Other Western Digital drives, have worked fine in the past, and thats why I purhased this drive. Will this be the last Western Digital Drive, that I purchase. Maybe the small size, and quiet nature were too good to be true.
