Good Basic Drive – Unacceptable Documentation, Software and Support
Posted in Use by Manyu Wednesday, August 17th, 2011
if you’re looking for a good basic hard drive and you plan to supply your own backup software, or are content to copy & past files to the drive, then this is a good basic portable hard drive. It’s not the smallest, or the fastest, but for the money, it’s a good buy.
On the downside, the included backup software (WD SmartWare) has been dumbed down to a point that it is next to useless. You have virtually no control over the individual files that get backed up and it has no provision to do a system backup. SmartWare decides for you (I guess that’s the so-called, “Smart” part of SmartWhere). It’s an all or nothing proposition. SmartWare only allows you to select the category of files that are backed up, for example, all documents, or all pictures. You have no control over which documents, or which pictures. Add to that the fact that the software has proven to be somewhat unreliable, and you’d be better off with any number of free backup programs available on the Internet.
Another major frustration is the extremely poor documentation. The package contains not a single word about how to hook this drive up, or how to access the onboard PDF help files. If you’re new to computers, or computer illiterate, you’re out of luck. To me, this growing trend is very unacceptable! Another growing trend that I find annoying is that fact that after the first 30-days, any call to tech support is charged at a rate of $14.95 per incident. This means for example, that if you update your SmartWare software (which it will periodically prompt you to do) in a couple of months and you can no longer find any of your backed up files, (a common complaint) it’s going to cost you an additional $14.95 to get things working again. In other words, you’re going to have to pay Western Digital to help you work around problems caused by their faulty software! That assumes the person on the other end of the phone has a clue what you’re talking about, but I’ll save that rant for another time.
A final concern is the fragile nature of the USB 3.0 connector that attaches the drive to the computer. This connector, which looks like two side-by-side micro-USB connectors, will take very little abuse before it fails. It may be good marketing to say that the drive is USB 3.0 compatible, but in reality very few, if any computers available today come standard with USB 3.0. Even if you have a USB 3.0 connection, you will only realize a modest gain in speed. Nowhere near the 10X speed potential claimed for USB 3.0. Everything in design is a tradeoff, but considering the portable nature of this drive and the fact that it will routinely be plugged and unplugged, possibly many times a day, I think the decision to go with USB3.0 was a poor one. If you read the various reviews, you will see several complaints that the drive all of a sudden quit working. I suspect that in many of these cases, a failed USB 3.0 connector is to blame. WD would have been better off sticking with the mini-USB connector and USB 2.0.
The bottom line is this. If you just want a basic, high density, portable hard drive at a reasonable price and you plan to supply your own backup software, then this drive is a good choice. If you’re new to computers and need a bit of handholding during installation, or if flexible backup software is important to you, then look else ware.
