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3.0

Got a new 1 TB Western Digital external hard drive, the My Book Essentials with Smartware. Smartware really $ucks It is painfully slow, hangs, crashes a lot & takes forever to switch tabs looong hour glass no way to verify if the backup is good.

This โ€œSmartWareโ€ is Western Digitalโ€™s attempt to introduce their backup

and security solution onto unsuspecting consumers. You know about it

because it is prominently advertised as a great new feature but you are

in for a rude awakening if you have no need for it and want to delete

it and claim back precious disk space. The software appears on your

desktop as a separate volume. Donโ€™t want to use it or see it, letโ€™s

just remove itโ€ฆ whoops, itโ€™s back, WTF is that about.

You have to run two separate apps that you can download from their

site. One is to update the driveโ€™s firmware first and the second app

allows you to hide and unhide the volume. Backup and security software

is supposed to run silently in the background. It needs to stay out of

your way not jump in your face, are you listening Western Digital. This

is what happens when proprietary gear heads get locked together in a

dark room. A monkey with a Ouija board could have seen the backlash

with a bonehead decision like this. If there wasnโ€™t a backlash why

would they provide software to hide the volume.

Funny how the marketing group decided to exclude this little tidbit of

information from consumers.

The software total junk - hope the drive is reliable, use windows back up

Location: Eglin Afb, Florida

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