Topic: Rant about Western Digital (Read 10542 times)

Justan · « **on:** December 17, 2009, 02:12:43 pm »

I've bought a number of drives both internal and external from WD and have become fed up with the tactics they use.

They have a habit of supporting some Windows platforms with some drives but not supporting others. They always blame MS when there is a problem. Here is an example:

At one office I have 4 2TB external drives in service. These are the My Book Pro Edition II drives. These drives were connected to windows server 2003 platforms. The drives have been in service about a year and work fine. At this office I'm migrating the server platforms to Windows Server 2008. When I connected the drive to the 2008 platform, lo and behold it does not work. A call to WD support confirms that WD does not make drivers for this drive which are used on this platform.

Now note that they have other external drives which work fine with Windows server 2008. I asked why this is and got some vague evasive response that while MS makes drivers for some of WD external drives, MS doesn’t make drivers for all.

What utter bull Shit. I have external drives from Seagate, Hitachi, LaCie in service at a dozen offices running every version of Windows server from 2000 to 2008. Never a problem with any platform. Most vendors make their drives to a USB spec and any machine that supports the spec (USB 2.0) works fine. That is the reason for specifications.

In another recent example, a WD drive failed after a month in service. Again, the drive was on a Windows 2003 server. WD sent a replacement that by their own statement was intended for a Mac. Not even close to the model that they replaced. When it didn’t work, I called and they said to reformat the drive. I did and of course it still didn’t work. I called back and they said that they’d send another replacement. They did about a week later and guess what? The drive wouldn’t work with the Windows server 2003 platform. I called back and they said that they don’t support the platform. I said that I had several of their drives in service. Again the vague evasive reply that MS provides drivers for some of their products. Pure sleaze. They refused to offer any remedy.

I could cite many other examples, but the short summary is that WD is severely lacking in too many ways to continue to support their products.

If anyone is thinking of using a Windows server platform, don’t expect your WD drive to work.

Thanks for reading.

John.Murray · « **Reply #1 on:** December 17, 2009, 02:32:10 pm »

That is very bizarre

What type of interface does the external drive use? What filesystem is on the drive? If it's NTFS and was created on Server 2003 as local/domain admin - you may well be unable to mount it from another server. Is the filesystem encrypted?

Run diskmgmt.msc and take a peek....

Drives are drives - there are *no* differences between drives "made for a mac" from any other, besides marketing......

Justan · « **Reply #2 on:** December 17, 2009, 02:38:40 pm »

> Drives are drives - there are *no* differences between drives "made for a mac" from any other, besides marketing......

...unless they are made by WD...

> What type of interface does the external drive use?

Simple USB with NTFS file system.

The issue is not one of problems reading files or encryption, the issue is lack of support at the driver level owing to WD.

DarkPenguin · « **Reply #3 on:** December 17, 2009, 02:40:33 pm »

Quote from: Justan

> Drives are drives - there are *no* differences between drives "made for a mac" from any other, besides marketing......

...unless they are made by WD...

> What type of interface does the external drive use?

Simple USB with NTFS file system.

The issue is not one of problems reading files or encryption, the issue is lack of support at the driver level owing to WD.

What drivers are you referring to? There shouldn't be anything specific to WD. Are these things in some kind of odd raid?

ErikKaffehr · « **Reply #4 on:** December 17, 2009, 02:51:31 pm »

Hi,

USB chipsets may differ. I do have issues with some WD external devices on my Macs (mostly related to sleep mode with 1394 (FW) and/or E-SATA).

On the other hand I have used dozens of external USB devices on all available OS-es, Linux, Mac OS-X, Win 2000, XP, Server 2003, XP 64-bits. Both at office and at home I use mostly WDs. I had some problems, but I have had problem with all makes except Samsung and Toshiba, never had Toshiba and just two Samsung drives.

Best regards
Erik

Quote from: Joh.Murray

That is very bizarre

What type of interface does the external drive use? What filesystem is on the drive? If it's NTFS and was created on Server 2003 as local/domain admin - you may well be unable to mount it from another server. Is the filesystem encrypted? Run diskmgmt.msc and take a peek....

Drives are drives - there are *no* differences between drives "made for a mac" from any other, besides marketing......

Justan · « **Reply #5 on:** December 17, 2009, 03:02:35 pm »

Quote from: DarkPenguin

What drivers are you referring to? There shouldn't be anything specific to WD. Are these things in some kind of odd raid?

You are missing the point: WD does not support Windows 2003 or 2008 with these drives.

John.Murray · « **Reply #6 on:** December 17, 2009, 07:13:17 pm »

What specific model? Just curious.....

I've built 3 2008/64 Servers in the last 2 weeks (end of the year budget spending ) all with WD drives. I've used nothing but WD lately in all machines we've provided.

Jonathan Wienke · « **Reply #7 on:** December 18, 2009, 08:02:33 am »

Sounds like a combination of a USB chipset conflict (rare, but does happen) and user error to me. I've used internal and external WD drives on everything from Windows 95 to Vista and never had a single problem of an kind.

JeffKohn · « **Reply #8 on:** December 18, 2009, 12:06:03 pm »

Don't read too much into the support person's response. Support people tend to be fairly ignorant, and are always more than happy to blame a problem on somebody else or an unsupported configuration. The fact that they told you they don't "make drivers" for that OS is completely bogus. You don't install drivers for external USB/Firewire drives. They just show up as removable storage, no special drivers needed. That's how USB works. The U in USB stands for 'universal', after all.

More likely it's a compatibility issue between the USB controller in that particular computer and the USB chipset in the external drive.

DarkPenguin · « **Reply #9 on:** December 18, 2009, 12:41:07 pm »

Quote from: JeffKohn

Don't read too much into the support person's response. Support people tend to be fairly ignorant, and are always more than happy to blame a problem on somebody else or an unsupported configuration. The fact that they told you they don't "make drivers" for that OS is completely bogus. You don't install drivers for external USB/Firewire drives. They just show up as removable storage, no special drivers needed. That's how USB works. The U in USB stands for 'universal', after all.

More likely it's a compatibility issue between the USB controller in that particular computer and the USB chipset in the external drive.

Might want to update chipset drivers.

Slobodan Blagojevic · « **Reply #10 on:** December 18, 2009, 01:48:01 pm »

Hey guys, please refrain from bashing WDC! I have a significant stock investment in it (and this year it's been up like 300%).

PierreVandevenne · « **Reply #11 on:** December 18, 2009, 05:52:26 pm »

Quote from: Justan

fine. At this office I'm migrating the server platforms to Windows Server 2008. When I connected the drive to the 2008 platform, lo and behold it does not work.

Works for me. I've got the triple interface ones (USB/FW/eSata). I did run into some eSata issues on some machines, but that's more hardware/BIOS related on the MB side than WD's fault. Note: I never install any kind of software provided with external hard drives. I don't need those one touch backup or shadow copy things. Maybe that's what giving you trouble? I repartition and reformat any external hard drive to my liking before use.

PierreVandevenne · « **Reply #12 on:** December 18, 2009, 05:53:14 pm »

Quote from: slobodan56

Hey guys, please refrain from bashing WDC! I have a significant stock investment in it (and this year it's been up like 300%).

Any good advice for next year? ;-)

Misirlou · « **Reply #13 on:** December 18, 2009, 06:24:48 pm »

Sounds like a USB issue. I have a 500 G Seagate external drive that I use for my primary Lightroom storage and catalog. When I first started using the Windows 7 release candidate on one of my laptops, the Seagate drive made a horrible clicking noise when I plugged it in to a USB port. I was sure I just fried the drive. But it worked when I plugged it into a Vista machine. Then I tried it in another W7 machine, and there was the clicking again.

A few weeks later, I read a post here on LL where someone was using one with W7. Sure enough, it worked fine on the laptop, and every other W7 machine I tested it with. Must have been a USB driver addressed in one of the Windows Updates.

Unlike Slobo, I don't have WD stock, but I do buy mostly WD drives. Haven't had many issues really. I have an early model 1Tb MyBook World, but it's connected through my network via ethernet.

Plekto · « **Reply #14 on:** December 20, 2009, 10:23:51 pm »

Odd. My external drive is a simple WD 2.5 inch drive that I dropped in a $15 USB 2.0 box. Not something *from* WD or marketed as an external drive, but my own box and a drive. I bet if you yanked the drive from the box and dropped it in, say, a simple box.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16817159091
Something like this. Mine is an older nearly identical I-rocks, which still works fine even though they are out of business.

I can guarantee that the drive itself is just a drive and will work with *anything*.

Fritzer · « **Reply #15 on:** December 26, 2009, 08:53:07 am »

WD makes excellent harddrives, but shoddy enclosures, cause they mess with the interfaces in most models.

Enclosures with generic Oxford interfaces are not known for compatibility or reliabilty issues, as long as you know how to format a drive.

Author Topic: Rant about Western Digital (Read 10542 times)

DarkPenguin

DarkPenguin