Friday, December 7th 2007
Western Digital's 1TB World Edition Hard Drive is DRM-Crippled
A member at Reg Hardware has reported that Western Digital's 1TB My Book World Edition remote-access hard drive does not share media files over network connections. Which is, the entire point behind the World Edition lineup of hard disk drives.
Source:
Reg Hardware
"Due to unverifiable media license authentication, the most common audio and video file types cannot be shared with different users using WD Anywhere Access."Western Digital's list of banned file types encompasses over 35 extensions. This includes AAC, MP3, AVI, DivX, WMV, and Quicktime files. And why not - Windows TMP files too.
23 Comments on Western Digital's 1TB World Edition Hard Drive is DRM-Crippled
wow. WD, what a bunch of morons... WD is a business. There is no way that they decided to do this on their own, since that is essentially killing demand for the product. :wtf: Me thinks someone paid them to do this (obvious detector turned off, put away...)
buuut whoOOo? :wtf:
edit: not a big loss anyways, just read some reviews, apparently these drives are major crap to begin with haha.
Put your media files into a .zip file!
blog.wired.com/gadgets/2007/12/western-digital.html
WTF is the point of a 1TB hard drive anyway? Unless they are used for servers I see no point of them even being sold on the public market. I mean, you have to be the Blue Beard of pirates to need that much storage at home.
For starters this only effects the WD MyBook World Editions... The World part is very important in this case. The world edition drives feature built in UPNP software, blah blah blah, the USB/Firewire external drive (WD MyBook, notice the lack of world edition Mussels :P) are a different setup, I can share whatever I want using this...
Secondly, all information I was able to dig up show that this doesn't affect the SMB sharing capabilities of the MyBoook World Edition, just Western Digitals funky access anywhere thingy...
Thirdly, software is only required to operate the Access Anywhere stuff... Not to use the drive.
Now enough backing up this product! I would not recommend this drive, or at least the one that I have.
1 - The drive transfer speed as noted by Mussels is far too slow for a raid external firewire drive (Mussels will no doubt tell you exactly how fast we clocked it). Personally it's fast enough for me, getting stuff on there is slow, but I only use it for storing multimedia files and not live editing or anything funky...
2 - Temparature control issues. Recently on hotter days (26 degrees room temp) the drive, even though well ventilated, overheats and shuts down. :(
3 - Noise issues. The inbuilt cooling, while innefective as mentioned above is also VERY noisy, this can be fixed partially by upgrading firmware, but on a hot summer night, it can still be heard over whatever movie I'm playing, whirring away...
4 - Management software. The software that comes with it is dodgy and constantly crashes (will not work at all on Vista X64)... But that's no real problem, as you only need the management software to upgrade firmware, and to set raid modes :P
So that's the deal with the MyBooks :P
As you can see, it aint as bad as you think... Chances are if you are into downloading multimedia, WD Anywhere aint for you anyway, I suggest you go looking for a good torrent!
Cheers,
Stubbers
oh and since stubbers asked, the peak was around 25MB/s over firewire - compared to the 63MB/s of my samsung 500GB, this raid fails hard... (using vistas transfer, to another 500GB samsung drive)
could you imagine having to go through 1TB of pure rubbish cause someone wants you to find a vid clip they downloaded 2 years ago?! :twitch:
Anyhow, I get the feeling this is more WD trying to cover their ass right now