I recently purchased two “WD easystore 14TB External USB 3.0 Hard Drives”. I attached them to my PC and let Windows do its thing to install drivers etc. and they show up as “WD easystore 264D USB Device” in Device Manager. Note, I did NOT manually install any software, e.g. the “Install Western Digital Software for Windows.exe” that was found on the drive.
However, I noticed Windows Update now reports a new optional driver update - a “Western Digital Technologies - WDC_SAM - 11/30/2017 12:00:00 AM - 1.2.0.0” is listed as an optional driver update.
What is this WDC_SAM driver? What kind of functionality does it provide and will be missing by not installing it?
Why wasn’t it installed when the drivers for “WD easystore 14TB” drives were installed?
No, I did not get any response and did not find out what this additional optional driver does.
I simply keep avoiding installing it and seemingly have not had any issues or problems by not installing it.
If your research finds out more about this WDC_SAM driver, please update this thread.
I understand this is probably not helpful for you now. But, in the interest of future inquiries on this topic, I figured I would post my findings associated with this driver and the WD My Book Pro raid device.
In my case, installing this “optional” driver was a requirement. Once I realized it was available in the optional driver updates, I installed it and everything worked correctly.
It was not installed with the software (like the documentation claimed) or automatically installed via Windows Update (like the manual claimed). The software was functional if the drives were already initialized and formatted. However, once tried to configure them for RAID 1, it would immediately uninitialize the drives and force me to redo everything. Note: before installing the driver, I could use the software normally except in regards to reformatting/configuring the RAID type for the drives which is kind of the purpose of the software.
It might be worth mentioning that the software ran without issues on MacOS and I could run the configuration using exFAT. Once I moved it over to Windows before installing the driver, I reformatted the drive to NTFS using Disk Management and the drives were still in RAID 1 which I thought was odd but I probably just don’t know enough on that subject.
I believe your experience with the RAID 1 array was because the disk array is established foremost with the hard drive setup, and the system volume format is determined afterward by your file system choice.
