Is it true that the VCD on newer drives (at least on My Passport Essential SE) is much less intrusive in that it only shows up when the drive has the locking enabled? At least on mine, if I hadn’t tried out the locking feature (which I really have no use for) I never would have known there was a VCD buried in the firmware. Without using locking it behaves just like you’d hope for a large USB, fast, trouble free and accessible from anywhere.
You wouldn’t know this VCD behavior from the documentation or the unpleasant descriptions about unwanted VCD behvior in this forum.
More on my experience is here . . . As I ask in that post,
Can anyone find out as of what models/model numbers/serial numbers this change took place?
It sounds like you have one of the new ones. The old one poped up as soon as the drive connected unless you disabled it happened every time. Glad they got it fixed it’s been a royal pain for most people. Now how many months will it take to get rid on the old ones in stock!
Well, the 1T MyPassport "Essential SE"s that seem to be going like hotcakes for $99 at Costco appear to be all new. I now have two of them, and so far seem well worth the money.
Did I miss something in the on-line documentation about this “new” vs. “old” change-over? All I saw was descriptions about how the “old” models worked and was about to think I had defective drives instead of what turned out to be an improvement. It took a week-long e-mail exchange with tech support to get them to even realize what I had (after even rediculously suggesting I do an RMA exchange).
Has anyone seen anything in “official” on the “new” behaviour?
Seen anything official? Yes, but it’d take a while to find the right posts.
I believe that Bill has said that some newest drives were shipping without the Smartware program on the VCD, just the lock/unlock bits and pieces, several times. The difference is whether the VCD is named “WD Smartware” or “WD Unlocker”.
And at least one of the WD_Staff has explained that the new unlocker VCD does not need to be “hidden” manually – that it only appears if you set a password, and if you remove the password it hides itself again.
Using SmartWare to remove the password from the drive will also remove the “WD Unlocker” VCD on the next time you reboot your computer or unplug/replug the drive.
Thanks! The discussion there indeed confirms exactly how my VCD behaves. I must say however that random posts (even on an “official” WDC forum) does not constitute much of anything official for me. When I want to look up how a device is intended to work, I go to the company’s on-line documentation, and so far I have seen nothing of the sort on these newer drives. Searching around forum posts is, and should not be the first line of attack for unsuspecting users trying to understand a new piece of equipment. In fact I spent a considereable amount of time googling variations on “MyPassport VCD” and came up with nothing to explain why my drive was not behaving as the on-line docs and all locatable forum discussions made me expect. It took a week of back-and forth e-mails with tech support to satisfy myself that everything was as it should be.
For example this link, refered to in the above forum post (which my googling somehow failed to expose) does not work for these newer drives, and I was seriously thown off by the fact that the program “VCD Manager” you are asked to download from that site fails to recognize when the new drives are even plugged in, and thus leads you to think there is a serious defect of some kind, when really everything is working just fine. I strongly urge WCD documentation maintainers to fix this.
As I have said, aside from this minor hic-up, I think these drives are really neat, especially the fact that they are entirely powered off of the USB connection, and now no nasty VCD unless you insist on locking the device.
I must say however that random posts (even on an “official” WDC forum) does not constitute much of anything official for me. When I want to look up how a device is intended to work, I go to the company’s on-line documentation, and so far I have seen nothing of the sort on these newer drives.
Fair enough.
I know one post referenced either June 15th or July 15th as to when the change was made for some drives, but I couldn’t find anything in the KB or other documentation as to where that info came from.
Yes, there should be better information available. But there should also be better information available to the Support Centres… once they had your serial, they should have been immediately able to tell which VCD version your drive had and it shouldn’t have taken so long to work things out.
I’ve been vocal about WD getting better information to the Support Centres several times.
