Customer Reviews

A Quick Return
I bought this drive yesterday and I am returning it today. The reasons? There are two main ones. Like the first reviewer, I find it annoying that Western Digital bundles the drive with their automatic software utility. The first thing I did was reformat this drive using the disk utility on my macbook. The drive reformatted, but the bundled software remained on my desktop. I still had to eject both to unplug the drive. When I plugged it into my PC, the automatic software came up there too and informed me that there was no longer a partition able to accept their program and that I should make sure that the drive was formatted correctly. I formatted it FAT32 so that I could use it between my Mac and my PC. Every time I plug it into my PC, the new hardware wizard pops up and tells me that the drive was installed incorrectly and may not work properly. So far it does work properly, but I have no intention of going through this every time I want to access this drive on my PC. I know that I could probably reformat the drive another way, or use my Mac to erase the contents more thouroughly, but that leads me to my second complaint: the USB connector is awful. WD seems to have gone to the newer micro-USB connector. In addition to this making all my other USB cables obsolete, the connector will not stay in the drive. Any slight movement, and you lose connection with your computer (Which means going though the whole automatic software and hardware wizard nonsense again). Not very portable in my opinion.

I have used and liked WD drives in the past and was very excited to see a "portable" 1TB drive that did not require an external power source, but this drive will be going right back. I will spend the extra money for the Seagate 1TB freeagent go drive. I hope that one works right.

proprietary usb cable + software partition which cannot be removed
This unit came with a software partition which cannot be removed. I paid for a hard drive, not software. The partition acts as a virtual CD and tries to install itself every time you plug it into a computer. You cannot remove this partition either. A total waste of space on the hard drive and waste of time every time you have to tell it to not install. Almost as bad as that, the USB cable is a proprietary one. If you have another USB cable that you want to use (as the one that comes with it is very short) forget about it. This device is an evolutionary step backwards in technology. It's hard to imagine how something as simple as an external USB hard drive could be screwed up, but Western Digital somehow managed to do it.

Beautiful, reliable, tricky.
The drive is the most stylish (and the smallest) of all WD drives, and as all of their portables are, very reliable. Now quickly for the two issues many people mention:

1. The cable. Everyone relax, it's a standard micro USB. Yes, I wish it was a standard USB, but it's not such a big deal, micro USB is quickly becoming a standard too.

2. The CD software. Even on Amazon pages you can find solutions to disable this crap. I have no idea what WD was thinking - I get the "pre-installed" thing for newbies, but the lack of uninstall? Anyway, I did what any sane person should do: went to WD's page for the drive, checked the knowledge base, and guess what, the answers are there (including simpler solutions that the ones posted on Amazon). Also, worth mentioning is this little note: "In the future, WD will offer a VCD removal tool for those users that do not want to use the software.". GOOD. Better late than never, I guess.

To sum it up: don't let the cable/soft thingy get in the way. It is the best high capacity portable drive in the world. I have 15 of these, including first generation 40GB, and they are all just great.