My $434 Mistake
That'll teach me!
In a leap of enthusiastic ferver the other
day I bought a couple of 2.5" 1TB portable hard drives."popular brand" from Catch of the day(catchoftheday.com.au)
They arrived yesterday, and turned out to be western digital"my passport" drives.
They were small neat and looked on first inspection to be exactly what I had wanted.
I might add here, that part of what I wanted were the drives inside to possibly stick into a netbook or for other purposes.
Anyway, yours truly naturally had to crack the cases open for a lookie!
This is where the disappointment began, and it continued too!
The drive inside these things is an integral USB hard drive with the USB connector and some multi-pin, probably setup jumpers of some sort where a SATA connecter should have been.
Add to that, the USB connector is one of the non-standard things, similar to some of Nokias weired efforts on the N82, and possibly others.
so with an "Oh shit, I just bought 2 of the heaps of sh*t" I carefully re assembled it and stuck it on the shelf to be only ever used for it's intended purpose!
Damn!
Now I get to the PC side of it, as naturally I plugged it in to see what happened and to see if I really had 1TB in this little pocket drive.
The first weired thing that happened is that windows actually came up and annoyed me with a install software dialog which a couple of clicks completed anyway, and I got this extra drive that I hadn't counted on.
On further inspection, it was a fake CD full of software and an autorun.inf that tried to execute, (I have these patched out in the registry) and install goud-knows what on my system.
I later found out that you can use their custom software to turn this fake CD drive off, but it does have to be asked by anyone with 2 atoms of brain to rub together:
What the hellfire is wrong with just putting the software on the drive so people can goud-forbid, choose what to do with it.
I have this drive likely to be used on linux (not supported) and windows, and if I go mad in future, let some mac user plug one in too.
There are so many ways this could have been done nicely, but WD have made this whole thing disgustingly proprietary, and I would certainly recommend that anyone who wants a 1TB pocket drive should try and find something *not* western digital.
I have turned off the fake CD rubbish, and for now it seems to have stayed that way. it's a pity that 600mb of possibly usable drive space is being wasted by this, and it's not in the partition table or even available in HPA mode which is where some laptop vendors map out the end of drives to stick recovery data into.
So, for future reference, I'll just have to find out what SATA 1TB 2.5" drives exist.
In Australia, there just aren't any!
Weired!
In a leap of enthusiastic ferver the other
day I bought a couple of 2.5" 1TB portable hard drives."popular brand" from Catch of the day(catchoftheday.com.au)
They arrived yesterday, and turned out to be western digital"my passport" drives.
They were small neat and looked on first inspection to be exactly what I had wanted.
I might add here, that part of what I wanted were the drives inside to possibly stick into a netbook or for other purposes.
Anyway, yours truly naturally had to crack the cases open for a lookie!
This is where the disappointment began, and it continued too!
The drive inside these things is an integral USB hard drive with the USB connector and some multi-pin, probably setup jumpers of some sort where a SATA connecter should have been.
Add to that, the USB connector is one of the non-standard things, similar to some of Nokias weired efforts on the N82, and possibly others.
so with an "Oh shit, I just bought 2 of the heaps of sh*t" I carefully re assembled it and stuck it on the shelf to be only ever used for it's intended purpose!
Damn!
Now I get to the PC side of it, as naturally I plugged it in to see what happened and to see if I really had 1TB in this little pocket drive.
The first weired thing that happened is that windows actually came up and annoyed me with a install software dialog which a couple of clicks completed anyway, and I got this extra drive that I hadn't counted on.
On further inspection, it was a fake CD full of software and an autorun.inf that tried to execute, (I have these patched out in the registry) and install goud-knows what on my system.
I later found out that you can use their custom software to turn this fake CD drive off, but it does have to be asked by anyone with 2 atoms of brain to rub together:
What the hellfire is wrong with just putting the software on the drive so people can goud-forbid, choose what to do with it.
I have this drive likely to be used on linux (not supported) and windows, and if I go mad in future, let some mac user plug one in too.
There are so many ways this could have been done nicely, but WD have made this whole thing disgustingly proprietary, and I would certainly recommend that anyone who wants a 1TB pocket drive should try and find something *not* western digital.
I have turned off the fake CD rubbish, and for now it seems to have stayed that way. it's a pity that 600mb of possibly usable drive space is being wasted by this, and it's not in the partition table or even available in HPA mode which is where some laptop vendors map out the end of drives to stick recovery data into.
So, for future reference, I'll just have to find out what SATA 1TB 2.5" drives exist.
In Australia, there just aren't any!
Weired!