My Review of the Western Digital My Book Studio 1 TB FireWire 400/800 Drive

February 23, 2010 by admin

I am a member of the Amazon Vine program. Each month Amazon.com sends me products to review for their site. This month I received the Western Digital My Book Studio 1 TB FireWire 800/400, USB 2.0 External Hard Drive

Let me echo the thoughts of some of the other Amazon reviewers: The addition of the ‘smartware’ in such an intrusive way is not Mac-like and completely unnecessary. I did see the mandatory virtual CD disappear after I installed the smartware software on my Mac, but having to install anything to use an external hard drive is completely inexcusable. Western Digital loses two stars on this ‘feature’ alone.

Once installed, the included smartware software adds an equally unnecessary menu bar icon that does nothing but take up system resources. I was able to remove it from loading by going into user settings under system preferences and removing it from my startup items.

Features & Operation
Beyond the major software flaw, this is a good external storage device. There are few first party firewire 800 drives directed at Mac users, so this drive might be attractive for those looking for an easy solution to adding a high-speed time machine backup drive to their system. It is also compatible with Firewire 400 and USB 2.0… Read the rest of my review at Amazon.com (affiliate link).

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