Friday, December 7, 2007

Stay away... Far, Far, away!.

If anyone is even thinking about buying this drive:
...walk, no RUN far, far away! I purchased it online from Costco.ca because it was sold out at their warehouse. Now I'm thinking were they really sold out? Or had they just been silently returned to the manufacturer by the truck full? I was rather shocked that Western Digital's software was tied to a company named MioNet. I couldn't even see the drive until this software was installed. Upon installing it they have "premium" features that you must pay for after 30 days! I already paid enough for the drive, now I'm supposed to pay a monthly fee?? Insane! At first, things seem to work okay, no where near the speeds they advertise mind you. But today was the final straw... after losing access, not once, but twice to my "local" files I had enough and it was boxed up and will be returned on Sunday. The hoops one must go through to get the files back is painfully slow, and if you don't know a lot about computers I feel you will never see those local files again. One thing I read in the manual, that no one seems to mention online, is if you have another external drive hooked up to the one USB port and you want it to be readable AND writable it must be fat 32. If it's NTFS then it's readable only. All my other external drives were long ago updated to NTFS, so I would basically have to go back if I wanted to use them. If this drive, at least, had a firewire connection I might consider it again but the amount of time it takes to upload/download files through the network takes forever! I had approximately 30 gig of files on there today and to get them back to my laptop took about 2.5 hours! And I'm running 802.11N on both the router and my laptop. Can you imagine if the drive was full? It would takes days! The "Western Digital My Book World II" drive gets a big thumbs down from me. Remember that name and remember to run! Now I just need to find something else... anyone have a good review on a 1 TB drive?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Kansas....
Me again! Now this I know nothing about so I'll just skip to your next blog post for my reading pleasure. Good luck with your new Laptop and whatever. But I do thank my lucky stars for being able to put all my computer works into your very trusting, capable and loving hands. A big Thanks!! to you for keeping my PC up to date and humming along nicely.

Love Ya!

Anonymous said...

erk western digital! We bought my son an internal drive made by them ad it died in 3 months,got the replacement and it lasted exactly 3 months.