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Buying a external WD HD as a cheap OEM mechanism?

UltraNEO*

UltraNEO*

macrumors 601
Original poster
Jun 16, 2007
4,057
16
近畿日本
Hi all.. in the past I have purchased cheap external WDC passport drives to be used as replacement HDD (mostly cause they're cheaper than OEMs) for my MacBooks unfortunately times have changed and companies have gotten wiser!

Soo has anyone purchased one of those new curvy repackaged WD drives recently?

I guess if you're using them as external drives you'll never know it's changed. I took one apart recently with the intentions of installing the unit into his MacBookPro, only to discover they've changed it's default SATA connector and USB add-on card to a built-in MicroUSB, attached to it's HD controller! I know some of you will think I'm nuts, possible high from smoking something.. but here are the photos..

Manufacture: Western Digital
Model: WD5000BMVV
Capacity: 500Gb

WDC_DSC_0200-20100807-230551.jpg

WDC_DSC_0201-20100807-232556.jpg
 
I've heard about this. I guess it's cheaper because there is no adapter needed in the enclosure. It's lame but what can you do? You were trying to be too cheap :D
 
It is known since a long time that one must not buy these drives.
 
Where did you get the idea that those were cheaper than buying OEM drives? They are typically far more expensive. From newegg, that same drive that you are looking at is $30 cheaper as a bare drive than that external you bought.
 
Hellhammer said:
I've heard about this. I guess it's cheaper because there is no adapter needed in the enclosure. It's lame but what can you do? You were trying to be too cheap
Click to expand...

...and someone else beaten him to it! :eek:

alust2013 said:
Where did you get the idea that those were cheaper than buying OEM drives? They are typically far more expensive. From newegg, that same drive that you are looking at is $30 cheaper as a bare drive than that external you bought.
Click to expand...

A local store is having a clearance sale, it's closing down and those suckers where reduced by 40%!! Thus cheaper than OEM.
 
Yup. Everytime I see a WD drive on sale I just avoid it, since I know this is what'll be staring me in the face. Though I guess in a way its sort of a good thing, because if you buy this and something goes wrong, you no longer have any warranty support. Atleast with the retail drive kits you some sort of warranty. Some 3 years, some 5 years.
 
Eddyisgreat said:
Yup. Everytime I see a WD drive on sale I just avoid it, since I know this is what'll be staring me in the face. Though I guess in a way its sort of a good thing, because if you buy this and something goes wrong, you no longer have any warranty support. Atleast with the retail drive kits you some sort of warranty. Some 3 years, some 5 years.
Click to expand...

Hmm... Didn't know warranties were held by retailers, that's interesting. In the past whenever I experience issues/glitches with hardware, I go directly to the manufacturer; after all it's them whom made the product. I find usually resellers here are clueless about it's product.
 
alust2013 said:
Where did you get the idea that those were cheaper than buying OEM drives? They are typically far more expensive. From newegg, that same drive that you are looking at is $30 cheaper as a bare drive than that external you bought.
Click to expand...

A great example would be were the 1TB passports are about 120 bucks, where as the OEM 1TB 2.5" sells for 175-200 bucks. I have taken apart WD passports in the past to extract the hard drives, but WD has been making it consistently more and more difficult to do so. I do remember the time (back when they were still selling the larger passport drives), when you could use a subtle difference in the serial number's last 3 digits to determine if you had a drive with an on board micro USB connector or a regular SATA interface. Ah those were the days...:rolleyes:
 
UltraNEO* said:
Hmm... Didn't know warranties were held by retailers, that's interesting. In the past whenever I experience issues/glitches with hardware, I go directly to the manufacturer; after all it's them whom made the product. I find usually resellers here are clueless about it's product.
Click to expand...

No he is not talking about warranties being held by the retailers....rather the poster is referring to the fact that retail packaged units (as opposed to those extracted from external enclosures) will have a warranty of 3 or 5 years. If you extract a drive from an external enclosure (i.e. WD passport series), your warranty on the drive will be void.
 
I have done this before, but never came into this issue. I purchased a 320GB Seagate FreeAgent Go for my 13" White MacBook. This drive has been great. It now lives in my 13" MBP, and another 320GB Seagate Freeagent Go is used as a backup. I'm sorry to hear about your issues, but, I recommend putting it back together as well as you can and take it back to return it and act clueless about it....
 
Aboo said:
No he is not talking about warranties being held by the retailers....rather the poster is referring to the fact that retail packaged units (as opposed to those extracted from external enclosures) will have a warranty of 3 or 5 years. If you extract a drive from an external enclosure (i.e. WD passport series), your warranty on the drive will be void.
Click to expand...

Ahh.. well.. guess what WD doesn't know won't hurt them:p Then again, it's not like those things are sealed tightly!! Besides, this one was a favour for a friend. Me personally I ain't a fan of retail solutions, often those packages are fairly limiting when it comes to connectivity with exception to the Lacie stuff!! Now those rock!!
 
AlphaDogg said:
I have done this before, but never came into this issue. I purchased a 320GB Seagate FreeAgent Go for my 13" White MacBook. This drive has been great. It now lives in my 13" MBP, and another 320GB Seagate Freeagent Go is used as a backup. I'm sorry to hear about your issues, but, I recommend putting it back together as well as you can and take it back to return it and act clueless about it....
Click to expand...

Yeah! I suggested this to my friend but he's decided to keep the thing and utilise it as a external backup solution...thankfully there's no bloat-ware!! That would be a bigger pain!
 
DesmoPilot said:
Not really no, just format the drive.
Click to expand...

Sorry but formatting a WD drive with their so-called "Smartware" won't get rid of it (incase you haven't tried). On Mac OS X you can unmount the SmartWare partition for good by editing /etc/fstab and adding a line:

PHP: 
UUID=your_smartware_partitions_uuid_here none hfs rw,noauto 0 0

You'll get the UUID by typing:

PHP: 
diskutil info /Volumes/WD\ SmartWare
within Terminal.app.

A one liner for this:
PHP: 
sudo sh -c "echo UUID=`diskutil info /Volumes/WD\ SmartWare/ | grep 'UUID' | awk '{print $NF}'` none hfs rw,noauto 0 0 >> /etc/fstab"

Alternatively, download and run WD's VCD Manager. Done.
 
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