I’ve got a Western Digital 250Gb drive from a few years ago that I am planning to upgrade as it’s nearly full. Guess which company I’m not getting that upgrade from?

I’ve no use for a storage device that will decide on it’s own behalf what is or is not acceptable content. Western Digital can’t presume to know whether I’m infringing a third party copyright by storing a given MP3 file, or whether the file is specifically CC licensed, or whether I recorded it myself?

It’s deceptively marketed as being able to store up to 250,000 MP3 files (* will not operate correctly with MP3 files)

Western Digital realises it’s got around five years to a decade to extract money from Hard Drive sales before they’re made obsolete by flash storage, energy costs and MRAM, right?

Are there no be shareholders or employees at Western Digital who want to keep their company profitable and avoid a public relations melt-down?

From what I can tell, it’s run on a user-based system, and 1 user can’t access those filetypes that other users uploaded. The original uploader can access whatever they want on the drive from wherever they are, so COOP, everything they’re saying there is true.

If you don’t use the WD Anywhere Access software, there’s no restrictions on anything.

This is from about 30 seconds of research, but is this right?

That said, I think the limitation is a function of their bundled software, not the drive itself. (I’ve sent their customer service/tech support guys an email asking for clarification to be sure)

Saying you can’t share MP3s would require that the WD Anywhere software actually worked, which it doesn’t most of the time (in fact they had a complete outage of the system for several weeks a few months back).

hard drives
now suck ass

we can not buy from them

*sob sob sob*

i guess if you want something done right, make your own hard drives from scratch. Preach it, Father.

If, as DarrylB says, a subscription is required for shared remote access, then a WD server is obviously in the loop during data transfer. That means WD would be at least as liable to legal action as a torrent tracker if they didn’t cover themselves.

I have never bought anything other than WD hard drives because of their reliability. I don’t see myself changing brands over one product line. If those aren’t selling, they’ll either discontinue them or remove the restrictions.

Vote with your wallet, but consider all the options first.

One of the most persistent misunderstandings of the workings of a free market economy is the bizarre belief that people who are disappointed with the quality fo goods or services shouldn’t talk about it. Free markets rely on customers who are well informed about the quality of vendors’ wares so that they can pick the good ones and therefore punish the bad ones.

Writing about bad products discourages people from buying them, which discourages manufacturers from making them, which improves the market.

What you’re describing has nothing to do with the market. In the market, customers have a remedy beyond “start your own superior company” — that remedy is “don’t buy shoddy wares and help your neighbors avoid them, too.”

…That being said, rest assured someone’ll issue a patch to get around this crap within a week. Stay tuned to Boing Boing for further updates :p

No <strike> tag? tsk. ;)

2 MB Cache, sometimes when 8 or even 16 are advertised on the box. It’s a crapshoot on what you actually get.

IDE native interface connected to A)USB 2.0 (defaults to 1.1) or B)Firewire C)Cat5 (I have seen all three versions at my local WalMart)

7200 RPM instead of 10,000 RPM like it should be (again a crapshoot, some actually ARE 10,000 RPM, and some have even measured out at 5400 RPM)

Buggy drive controller circuits (This is a problem with WD drives above 320 GB – it’s almost like they hacked on the ability to deal with anything over 320 instead of designing a new controller)

The network controller interface on the enclosure is set to work at only the minimum connection rate on most home wireless routers that have NAS capability – 1/2 instead of 10/100/1000 via ethernet.

There’s some other issues people mentioned as well, such as faulty software. Cooling is a big issue with these NAS devices from WD. They run hot.

My best guess is, on the manufacturing line, they are using surplus notebook drives as well as the normal hard drives they should be and claim that they are using. No offense to manufacturing stuff in mainland China, but this happens more often now that production takes place there instead of in Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan where WD used to have their drives made.

Another note: They do 1 TB by putting in dual 2.5″ 500 GB drives and the controller in the enclosure reports them as a single drive to your system. Don’t let them fool you. I’ve taken a few of these apart so I could scavenge the drives and toss the junk enclosure.

After actually reading the information about this product- this makes sense. It has nothing to do with whether or not you can access your own files. They simply won’t allow you to share them with anyone else. Their system allows file sharing over the Internet for other files. They just don’t want to be sued by the RIAA and MPAA, or by an idiot that shares their media files and gets sued.

In short- if YOU plug this drive into your network- YOU can access all of YOUR files using YOUR login credentials from anywhere. That’s pretty much what you want from NAS anyway. There are lots of other options if you want to plug a drive into the Internet and let anyone access it. If you really want to do that- the folks at PirateBay would probably like to talk to you, with the RIAA and MPAA close behind.

You can do more for less money with an older or cheap bare-bones laptop, a couple of 500GB SATA drives in USB2 enclosures, and Open Source software anyway.

WD is one of the few companies I’ll still buy drives from, and I don’t think they have done anything deceptive or wrong here.

Some could argue that the drive itself is crippled…after all, it is from Western Digital. The same HDD company that only offers a three year warranty, whereas their major competitor (Seagate) offers a five year warranty for the same price.

Finally a good argument to transcode everything to OGG Vorbis/Theora files.

That or encode everything in PGP container files.

Every time the MAFIAA pushes these things they just make transfer and sharing that much more robust.

What happens when drives no longer contain avi, divx, mp3, mpeg etc. files for the MAFIAA to scan for?

BEAT THAT WD

Ah yes, the free market objection. There’s one in every crowd.

Let’s set aside the unrealistic and somewhat farsical suggestion to “start your own gosh-darned hard drive company” and look at the other alternative pointed out by Cory, namely going somewhere else for the product.

This assumes, of course, that there IS somewhere else. Sometimes there is, sometimes there ain’t. And demand may produce supply; then again it may not. An alternative also may not appear for years.

PS: I notice you used “gosh-darned” instead of “Goddamned,” but have no compunction about using the insulting words “whining and sniveling.” Feel free to self-edit some of those terms from your posts, too, please. Thank you.

Misleading/inaccurate article summary on BoingBoing?!?!

say it ain’t so!

I did read the source material and decide for myself (see Comment #13). Now who’s commenting without reading OH SNAP.

really though, I was only teasing. jumping on a story half-cocked is the internet way! the headline/summary IS really misleading, though! I supposed it’s technically true, but the way it’s worded doesn’t really describe the entire actual situation

I think TubMan makes a really interesting point about the possible legal reasons behind this, and I wonder if we’ll get some kind of official response at some point now that the “story” “broke”.

What I find especially hilarious is that it doesn’t appear to restrict any truly risky file types. So yeah, if you want to share your media with others, you can’t. If you misconfigure it, they are free to browse thru personal documents, saved passwords, cookies…

but yeah, did anyone RTFA before ranting about it?

That they tried and did a really bad job of restricting how you use the device you paid for is not a mitigating factor.

If a house guest tries to steal your valuables, you don’t invite them back just because you easily thwarted their attempt.

Quoted from the side of the box (2TB version);

“A simple and secure way to share data, pictures, music at home, in the office, and anywhere in the world – even when your computer is off”.

There is no indication that you have to sign up for some sort of subscription service (you do) or that there are any rectrictions on the product (there are).

That’s why this sucks.

coop

“Did anyone READ the article? You can listen to any music you want. It’s only when you SHARE the music by turning the volume up that it cuts out. They didn’t want to be sued by the RIAA. A stereo that won’t play loud is perfectly reasonable!”

Cory: If you want to criticize DRM (and you should) then you should really consider taking the moral high road. To publish what amounts to outright lies hurts us all.