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The first time I called, they ran me through the routine and rushed me off the phone. I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out how and what happened. After purchasing a WD My Passport I proceeded to back up my computer and several pin drives to this hard drive. When that didn't work, they insisted I had never put any other files on this hard drive. Do not waste your time or money buy a better product as I since have. When I went back to access the files from this hard drive I found ALL of my files from my pin drives were gone. When I called Western Digitals customer service I was not listened to.
Data transfer rates are OK for me (I am not as demanding as some as I transfer mostly documents).I have heard that the larger capacity WD drives (over 250GB) of this type have problems. I am satisfied with the drive as far as I use it, which is as an alternative short -term backup that keeps data off the computer but still accessible (I keep no personal data on the hard drives and offload any new data at the end of the day when I "clean" my PC).It is a great size and easily portable - however I strongly recommend buying a hard case to transport it in your computer bag. However, this one has worked well at a reasonable cost. I cannot comment on that. I bought a Case Logic Compact Portable Hard Drive Case which fits it very well (the case is fatter than the drive, but I keep other items in it as well).It is very quiet. I have no problems with connecting it to different machines; it shows up immediately as a device and runs flawlessly.
I bought this 1.5 years ago. Then, it started to disconnect on its own every now and then, only to reconnect about a minute later. After another episode of clicking, I decided to exchange, to be on the safe side. The second drive started clicking after about 2 months.
They are now sending me a fifth drive. That became a nuisance, so I started the exchange process again; customer service now seems to be in India. 50 GB) onto it, then started clicking and complaining. I am definitely buying from someone other than WD next time. The fourth drive let me save about 5 GB onto it, then disconnected completely and never connected again. After about 9 months, this first drive clicked.
The third drive only let me copy about 1/2 of my data (ca. Hope that solid state will soon be affordable. RMA and customer service then seemed to be in the US. I decided to just back up to an old, clunky external and live with the clicking.
I highly recommend it It has worked well for me for almost 18 months.
Overall, this is one of the worst pocket drives I've ever owned. Force-quitting the demons using Activity Monitor doesn't help, because they simply re-start and, while they're running, slows every other process down to a crawl or not working at all. And why does so much drive space have to be wasted on a separate virtual (virtually, stupidly wasteful) partition that cannot be erased. Oh, did I mention it was very, very expensive compared to the competition. The smartware demons running in the background (even when the drive is not plugged in). For Mac users at least, this is an absolutely demonic drive.
Why is it necessary to install proprietary driver software to use this drive when most drives simply use the built-in drivers in the Mac OS. Plus, I'd mention that the proprietary mini-USB cable failed after just two months and was hard to replace. (Mine has 1Tb capacity but the problematic software is virtually the same). eat up tons of memory, plus hog as much as 98% of the CPU, making other programs like Safari stand stock-still for minutes at a time. Why pay less when you can get ten times the aggravation. The problems lie mostly in the software, not the drive itself.
The HD Smartware drivers for Mac have absolutely gummed up my new MacBook Pro running 10.6.4.
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