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Western Digital Warns External Hard Drive Customers Over Mavericks Data Loss
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Again depending on the size of the staff not always possible and resources are limited. On top of that by the looks of things it is a small remote bug. To find it it would of required a lot of manpower to do a full test.
Unless you have a tons of money to threw around for a full blown regression test to find the bug. You again are showing how little you understand development time tables and cost.
Regression testing is not cheap, no one likes to do it and chances are you will be pulling a lot of devs off of other projects to finish it out.
5 weeks is next to no time in dev world.
Also you are comparing WD software which might have a few devs on it to a company wide product. I can promise you for parallels they spent a crap ton of money and time to do that and were working on it for a long time. I can bet there was tons of bitching from their devs at the crap Apple broke.
My test system has a WD MyBook Studio II connected via Firewire 800 and occasionally also has a Seagate FreeAgent (portable) which I connect via FW 800. IIRC both had multiple partitions and on each one of those partitions there was a Time Machine partition. (I usually backup system perodically to an attached drive and continuously to a NAS).
About a half dozen times during Mavericks testing and development my Seagate FreeAgent would "spontaneously reformat" and would be named "MyBook". There was NO indication what so ever that this was going to happen, just one day I'd plugin my Seagate FA and Time Machine would report it was no longer able to find it's partition. I'd then notice the 2 partitions that used to be on the Seagate FA had been replaced by a single "MyBook" partition. Yes, that's right, WD software was reformatting my Seagate drive.
After a few weeks I removed WD Drive Manager from the test system and didn't have any further problems. I don't test software for WD or SG and didn't think much about it. I figured WD would have it resolved well before Mavericks actually got released to the public.
Wild, untested, uneducated guess.... I ran WD Manager because my MyBook Studio II is setup as a RAID. I'm guessing it mistook the seagate drive on the same bus (FireWire) as a damaged part of it's RAID and went about "fixing it". Again, that's just a very wild guess based on my one singular experience....
...but, be aware this definitely doesn't just affect WD drives, in face after each instance my WD drive was totally fine.
Oh, and BTW for anyone complaining about data loss. Bummer, you should back that stuff up if it's important. In a half dozen occurrences I didn't once lose one bit of data.
About a half dozen times during Mavericks testing and development my Seagate FreeAgent would "spontaneously reformat" and would be named "MyBook". There was NO indication what so ever that this was going to happen, just one day I'd plugin my Seagate FA and Time Machine would report it was no longer able to find it's partition. I'd then notice the 2 partitions that used to be on the Seagate FA had been replaced by a single "MyBook" partition. Yes, that's right, WD software was reformatting my Seagate drive.
After a few weeks I removed WD Drive Manager from the test system and didn't have any further problems. I don't test software for WD or SG and didn't think much about it. I figured WD would have it resolved well before Mavericks actually got released to the public.
Wild, untested, uneducated guess.... I ran WD Manager because my MyBook Studio II is setup as a RAID. I'm guessing it mistook the seagate drive on the same bus (FireWire) as a damaged part of it's RAID and went about "fixing it". Again, that's just a very wild guess based on my one singular experience....
...but, be aware this definitely doesn't just affect WD drives, in face after each instance my WD drive was totally fine.
Oh, and BTW for anyone complaining about data loss. Bummer, you should back that stuff up if it's important. In a half dozen occurrences I didn't once lose one bit of data.
I agree 100%, such software offers no value, often slows a machine down and as we can see is about as welcomed as a virus.
At a past job we had an entire office filled with broken MyBooks. Complete garbage they are.
Either the proprietary enclosure or the drive would go and they were a huge pain to open to get the drive out. Some models you couldn't even recover because it was a non-standard board on the hard drive.
No thanks WD... no thanks.
Either the proprietary enclosure or the drive would go and they were a huge pain to open to get the drive out. Some models you couldn't even recover because it was a non-standard board on the hard drive.
No thanks WD... no thanks.
Looks like WD didn't even bother to test their software before Mavericks shipped.
Looks like Apple didn't even bother to test their software with third party drivers and third party applications before they shipped it.
In less than a year? That is simply a quality issue.
Also, aren't you contradicting yourself here? If they all have limited lifespan, then how are we supposed to back up?
Back up to drive B, then drive C, then drive D, and so on?
Then how do you know if back up in drive C only last 3 days after you bought it and before you back it up onto drive D?
Why defend a quality issue?
I have a WD USB external drive that just died on me. Actually, it worked fine until I tried to re-install it in a NAS. Then, it died. Now, it won't even spin up. It's like there's no power. I don't use any of the software mentioned, but my HDD is a WD Green 3.5". Kinda old tho, so i really can't pinpoint 1 single cause of failure, but I wonder if this may have something to do with it...
The issue is that every developer should have know for a long time that Mavericks was coming. Paid developers have had access to the previews since WWDC. It is the developers' responsibility to test their apps against a new OS.
It is NOT Apple's responsibility to make sure 3rd party apps still work with new OS releases neither should it be. It IS 3rd party developers' responsibility to test their apps against new OS releases and if their app breaks, it is their responsibility to fix it.
WD could have and should have updated their software even before Mavericks was released.
So Microsoft lets the cart get ahead of the horse? That must be why Windows never gets improved in any significant way...
Apple wants to improve their product every chance they get. Being "bleeding edge" or not is irrelevant. Changes to the kernal, drivers, and SDK are never random. They are carefully planned. Sometimes it is necessary to change these things to make a significant improvement. And Apple should be able to be free to make such improvements as they see fit.
Out of all the applications I ran on Mountain Lion, not a single one was broken by the Mavericks update. Not even Microsoft Office. I'm not sure what WD's excuse is.
On another note, Western Digital are almost the only brand of drives I buy. I have several and I haven't had a problem with any of them... yet.
I can't stand companies that won't test their applications unless it's on a released version of the OS. All WD had to do was spend $99 for the developer program and their software could have been tested with one computer and avoided this whole mess. In the end, they are going to blame Apple.
I worked for a company once that did that. Their reasoning was that they won't give up the resources to test on an unreleased OS. I happen to believe that they're just cheapskates.
I worked for a company once that did that. Their reasoning was that they won't give up the resources to test on an unreleased OS. I happen to believe that they're just cheapskates.
again you do not understand it would require a full regression test. That is not cheap at all. Apple should not be breaking software on update.
It also does not mean it would of been caught either. Apple has a long record of screwing developers.
If you have experienced data loss with the following criteria then please open support cases with both Western Digital and Apple support:
If you are an Apple developer then please report an issue with Apple Bug Reporter.
- MacOS Mavericks 10.9
- WD Drive Manager / Raid Manager software installed
- data loss after a restart
- drives initialised to a single MyBook partition with exposed EFI partition
- loss of all existing partitions and directory structures
If you are an Apple developer then please report an issue with Apple Bug Reporter.
Unfortunately, that's why you don't use WD. Any drive manufacturer REQUIRING additional drive management software for features that are already in your OS (disk sleep, etc), is just that -- not compatible with your OS.
I got rid of my last WD drive & Smart Ware a while ago and NEVER looked back. I sent them feedback about this at their website, but they persist with annoying and what should be unnecessary software - as I told them - to the detriment of their customers' experience.
WD was always incompatible and their workaround failed.
I think the physical type of drive is irrelevant. I don't think it matters if it's an SSD or HDD. Besides SSDs are still too expensive. Maybe when I can get a 1TB SSD for around $100 like I can with a 1TB HDD then I'll get one.
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I have WD drives and have no issues whatsoever. They work great for me.
The upgrade to Mavericks made my HFS+ formatted WD USB3 external drive read-only. Couldn't fix it either with OSX or Linux, so I copied all the data over to a second computer, formatted the drive, and copied it back.
The Mavericks upgrade ALSO messed up the EFI partition on the internal SSD (of a rMBP). Mavericks Disk Utility reported it as unrepairable, but I managed to straiten things up by booting from an external ML Time Machine drive and running Disk Utility from that.
p.s. I had the WD software installed since it's the only way to check the SMART status of a USB3 drive AFAIK.
The Mavericks upgrade ALSO messed up the EFI partition on the internal SSD (of a rMBP). Mavericks Disk Utility reported it as unrepairable, but I managed to straiten things up by booting from an external ML Time Machine drive and running Disk Utility from that.
p.s. I had the WD software installed since it's the only way to check the SMART status of a USB3 drive AFAIK.
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These issues with drive recognition plus the keyboard/touch-pad wake-up/response issues lead me to suspect that Apple changed USB/PCI/Bus device registration and addressing in Mavericks. That would impact any software that is explicitly using addressing to access devices - possibly an API that wasn't updated properly by Apple. This would explain why the WD Smartware is having problems, but it may also explain why Mavericks is having issues talking to certain types of storage devices even without the WD software present.
This looks like it could be a problem with PCI Bus device addressing and that leads right back to Apple.
This looks like it could be a problem with PCI Bus device addressing and that leads right back to Apple.
It's not regression testing because the Western Digital software did not change.
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You have absolutely no way of knowing what caused the bug, therefore you have absolutely no way of knowing it is Apple's fault.