Western Digital Releases New Hard Drive Software After Mavericks Data Loss

Just don't use crapware.

Just don't use Western Digital. The quality of these drives is very bad. I've had 50 disks in my life and only ones that have failed are WD and same with colleagues and friends. Don't know how they get away with it. Reply to this will be someone saying they are brilliant.

Go Seagate. Oh and in this pc I have an awesome 1TB Samsung drive that has been flawless for 4 years.

upthetoffees said:

Just don't use Western Digital. The quality of these drives is very bad. I've had 50 disks in my life and only ones that have failed are WD and same with colleagues and friends. Don't know how they get away with it. Reply to this will be someone saying they are brilliant.

Go Seagate. Oh and in this pc I have an awesome 1TB Samsung drive that has been flawless for 4 years.

Click to expand...

I have had many a seagate drive fail. It is coming to the point that I do not know what brand to trust anymore.

Ingot said:

I have had many a seagate drive fail. It is coming to the point that I do not know what brand to trust anymore.

Click to expand...

Seagate enterprise stuff is good. Seagate consumer stuff, not as much.

I've had good luck with Hitachi consumer.

upthetoffees said:

Just don't use Western Digital. The quality of these drives is very bad. I've had 50 disks in my life and only ones that have failed are WD and same with colleagues and friends. Don't know how they get away with it. Reply to this will be someone saying they are brilliant.

Go Seagate. Oh and in this pc I have an awesome 1TB Samsung drive that has been flawless for 4 years.

Click to expand...

Wow, 50 discs. I've been using computers since 1981 but still (even with several NAS) never came to 50 discs. Do you run a data centre?

Ingot said:

I have had many a seagate drive fail. It is coming to the point that I do not know what brand to trust anymore.

Click to expand...

When it comes to hard drives, there really isn't a single company who has a perfect track record. They are complicated to build and operate, so they don't normally last long.

Not gonna say they're brilliant, but I've used dozens of WD drives over the last 15 years, and so far have only had 1 "Green" backup drive recently fail (after 3+ years).

Of course these have all been internal desktop/enterprise drives. I won't speak for their external products, as I've heard they're not quite as reliable.

EDIT: Regardless, this is about faulty software that had an unfortunate side effect rear its ugly head when coupled with a new Mac OS. Fortunately I have never used these tools.

upthetoffees said:

Just don't use Western Digital. The quality of these drives is very bad. I've had 50 disks in my life and only ones that have failed are WD and same with colleagues and friends. Don't know how they get away with it. Reply to this will be someone saying they are brilliant.

Click to expand...

The last sentence should be an indication to how pointless your post is.

No matter which manufacturer, you'll find thousands and thousands of stories like yours, and thousands of people who never had any problem. That's no contradiction given that there are millions of customers out there.

Your personal experience is not statistically significant. Sorry. You can all stop posting it. Thanks.

Ha! I beat the Front Page of Macrumors by 1 minute!

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1677792/

I had sent the story to tips@macrumors right before I posted in the forums.

WD released the updates yesterday. Kind of strange that no one noticed until today... they had so much bad press about this, I figured they would do an all-out PR assault with the news of this fix.

Hope it prevents more data loss from happening. I was lucky and did not lose any data on my and of my 7 WD external drives. I uninstalled the old software with the uninstaller they had posted on their website for a while and now I'm unsure if should install this new software at all. Does the new software have a fix built in? Or was the fix removing the software to begin with? I still haven't plugged my externals back in...

I remember the IBM (now Hitachi) Deskstars which had such a bad reputation for failure they were known as DeathStars.

Never touched WD's software. Never would.

I love their drives, and I use them with the Mac's own OS alone!

Their attempt to "add value" and "differentiate" has proven misguided and dangerous. Luckily, it's easy to bypass.

foobarbaz said:

No matter which manufacturer, you'll find thousands and thousands of stories like yours, and thousands of people who never had any problem. That's no contradiction given that there are millions of customers out there.

Click to expand...

Yup. All computers and components are ultimately flaky, stupid things, and someone, somewhere will have worse luck with a particular brand than someone else.

Like me. I've had a few WD drives in my day, and I've never had much problem out of them. Quantum? Back in 2000, I remember everyone telling me they were the best of the best. I also remember having to get new ones RMA'ed to me literally every 3 weeks for 3 months because each one I got would end up chik-chik-chik hardlocking on me. Number 6 ended up being the winner for me, which lasted me two years before dying off.

Same with Seagate. I've had a number of them crap out on me.

When it comes to harddrive specifically, it's less about one brand being better than another, and more about how the stars were aligned when you bought one.

ZOZO said:

When it comes to hard drives, there really isn't a single company who has a perfect track record. They are complicated to build and operate, so they don't normally last long.

Click to expand...

While there are definitely brands to "avoid" when it comes to hard drives, there's a saying in the IT industry concerning any current persistent storage technology:

"There are two kinds of hard drives - those are have failed, and those that are going to."

Last time I saw such an incompatibility in OS was in Vista.

upthetoffees said:

Just don't use Western Digital. The quality of these drives is very bad. I've had 50 disks in my life and only ones that have failed are WD and same with colleagues and friends. Don't know how they get away with it. Reply to this will be someone saying they are brilliant.

Click to expand...

Yeah, I have had terrible experiences with WD hard drives in the last 10-15 years or so. And their software is always awful, it's a bomb waiting to happen and can cause all kinds of problems. You shouldn't need to install software to manage your drive anyway. If you must use a WD drive, don't use their software.

The sad part is, I remember when back in the early to mid '90s, Western Digital drives were top of the line, really good and reliable. But those days are long gone.

That said, SSD is the way to go, it's still expensive but I can't go back to spinning disks with their inevitable problems.

upthetoffees said:

Just don't use Western Digital. The quality of these drives is very bad. I've had 50 disks in my life and only ones that have failed are WD and same with colleagues and friends. Don't know how they get away with it. Reply to this will be someone saying they are brilliant.

Go Seagate. Oh and in this pc I have an awesome 1TB Samsung drive that has been flawless for 4 years.

Click to expand...

Right like the OEM Seagate beauty that was in my 2010 iMac. A one-platter wonder with no landing for the arm when it was turned off. It was light as a feather and about as sturdy as one.

My autopsy revealed was a cheapie it was. I replaced it with a 2TB WD Scorpio Black. . . a real hard drive.

This story is about WD software. Not hardware.

I don't see why you would use this over time machine.

Ingot said:

I have had many a seagate drive fail. It is coming to the point that I do not know what brand to trust anymore.

Click to expand...

You don't trust a brand. You can't because each brand makes so many different models. One thing to look at is the warranty period. The low-end cheap drives only come with a 1 year warranty but each company makes some they will warrant for five years. Buy those.

Of douse most people will ignore this advice because the better 5 year drives cost more. People price shop then complain later. I have had a few drives with 5 year warranty that failed in the warranty period. I got anew drive shipped fast. Both WD and Segate.

Jimmy James said:

This story is about WD software. Not hardware.

I don't see why you would use this over time machine.

Click to expand...

I don't see why anyone would use Time Machine when they could use Carbon Copy Cloner. Of all the people whining they wish they could go back to Mountain Lion or even Snow Leopard, if they had used CCC, they could EASILY do that just by booting off the drive in question and then restoring back with CCC to the other drive when they're ready. You can even have multiple OS setups that way, each on their own drive if you wanted.

I've had Seagate, WD and back in the day Quantum SCSI with the Amiga. I've yet to have a single drive fail on ANY of them. I guess I'm just lucky (in fact that Amiga 3000 still works fine).

GoodWatch said:

Wow, 50 discs. I've been using computers since 1981 but still (even with several NAS) never came to 50 discs. Do you run a data centre?

Click to expand...

I think 50 may indeed be a reasonable number. I would say that on a personal level, I have owned probably about 30 drives or so, if I go all the way back to an 8086 that I had. But I also work as an IT manager, so I have to work with A LOT of hard drives and ALL brands have drives that fail, there is a certain percentage that is to be expected.

One other thing that ALL drives have in common is that you should NEVER use their custom software.

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TV Cameraman said:

Ha! I beat the Front Page of Macrumors by 1 minute!

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1677792/

I had sent the story to tips@macrumors right before I posted in the forums.

WD released the updates yesterday. Kind of strange that no one noticed until today... they had so much bad press about this, I figured they would do an all-out PR assault with the news of this fix.

Hope it prevents more data loss from happening. I was lucky and did not lose any data on my and of my 7 WD external drives. I uninstalled the old software with the uninstaller they had posted on their website for a while and now I'm unsure if should install this new software at all. Does the new software have a fix built in? Or was the fix removing the software to begin with? I still haven't plugged my externals back in...

Click to expand...

You should NEVER use custom software that is provided by a hard drive manufacturer.

They provide this software to try to lock you into using their drives in the future by providing proprietary backups, etc.

There is NO reason to use this custom software.

Ingot said:

I have had many a seagate drive fail. It is coming to the point that I do not know what brand to trust anymore.

Click to expand...

Western Digital and Seagate should be your only choices for HDD.

Eventually they're going to be irrelevant as SSD is going to take over soon. Unless WD and Seagate start doing producing their own SSD drives (I hope they do).

Before this gets bogged down with "don't use crapware" posts (again), let me first point out that with the WD RAID drives that we use (MyBook Studio II), you HAVE to use the WD utility to format the two drives and set up the initial RAID1, as Disk Utility won't do it. We have seven WD Raid arrays at work, and I myself have another at home, and have had no issues with them. As always, YMMV. Now, if you choose to use their backup apps, that's your problem. And even after setting up the RAID initially, you can immediately uninstall it if you so choose.

upthetoffees said:

Just don't use Western Digital. The quality of these drives is very bad. I've had 50 disks in my life and only ones that have failed are WD and same with colleagues and friends. Don't know how they get away with it. Reply to this will be someone saying they are brilliant.

Go Seagate. Oh and in this pc I have an awesome 1TB Samsung drive that has been flawless for 4 years.

Click to expand...

Been using WD hard drives since the 80s and 90s. Never had one fail.

MagnusVonMagnum said:

I don't see why anyone would use Time Machine when they could use Carbon Copy Cloner. Of all the people whining they wish they could go back to Mountain Lion or even Snow Leopard, if they had used CCC, they could EASILY do that just by booting off the drive in question and then restoring back with CCC to the other drive when they're ready. You can even have multiple OS setups that way, each on their own drive if you wanted.

I've had Seagate, WD and back in the day Quantum SCSI with the Amiga. I've yet to have a single drive fail on ANY of them. I guess I'm just lucky (in fact that Amiga 3000 still works fine).

Click to expand...

CCC doesn't do versioning like Time Machine does AFAIK. I use both anyways.

Ok so they fixed the software. but what does this really solve?

I have not upgraded to 10.9 for this reason only. I NEVER used WD software, but from reading Apple Forums, some people who didn't use WD software still lost data. And having about 15TB of photography backups on WD drives (both internal and external), it's really not a chance I can even consider taking.

Until both Apple and WD give me the green light saying that this is 100% resolved, I'll be staying on 10.8