Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
WD ships a 1TB NAS that is prohibited from sharing audio or video files.
Just what *I* want for my birthday...
Just what *I* want for my birthday...
Speaking of worthless WD products
- Thread starter Mercutio
- Start date
Wow. That is the dumbest thing ever. What affiliation does WD have with the media industry? Sony may be willing to let it's storage products flop in an attempt to help their movies, but WD doesn't make movies. If their HDDs don't sell, they're screwed.
Tannin
0
What fool would buy one of those? You'd have to be a complete idiot.
Sadly, there are a zillion idiots out there. Consumers are so stupid much of the time. Hell, look at Vista, a more than equally crippled product. Sure, it has sold at barely better than half the rate that XP sold at the equivalent time in its lifecycle, and (as admitted by Microsoft themselves) the vast majority of Vista sales have been forced sales via pre-loading on OEM systems, but there are still a lot of people who actually bought Vista of their own free will.
PT Barnum said it first: there is one born every minute.
Sadly, there are a zillion idiots out there. Consumers are so stupid much of the time. Hell, look at Vista, a more than equally crippled product. Sure, it has sold at barely better than half the rate that XP sold at the equivalent time in its lifecycle, and (as admitted by Microsoft themselves) the vast majority of Vista sales have been forced sales via pre-loading on OEM systems, but there are still a lot of people who actually bought Vista of their own free will.
PT Barnum said it first: there is one born every minute.
jtr1962
0
The kind of idiot likely to buy one is the same idiot who never bothers to read the fine print or do research before buying. I can picture it now:
The idiot gets home, and proudly shows off his new drive to a friend: "Hey look! It's got a gazillion billion bytes! Cool man!"
The friend says: "Hey dude, let's put some mp3s and vids on it, man. I bet that thing could hold both our whole collections. This is gonna be awesome man!"
They connect the thing, get ready to start copying, and suddenly one of them says "Oh, WTF". The other one starts reading the instruction manual. After about a day trying to sort things out they both finally get it: "Hey dude, this thing's a piece of sh*t."
Of course by then it's too late to return it for a full refund. Or maybe the store will actually take these back, and in a few months dump their surplus inventory on eBay for ten cents on the dollar.
It's a sad but true fact that most of our economy runs by getting people to buy things they don't need, or misrepresenting products while depending upon most consumers to not read the fine print which they put in to cover their behinds.
The idiot gets home, and proudly shows off his new drive to a friend: "Hey look! It's got a gazillion billion bytes! Cool man!"
The friend says: "Hey dude, let's put some mp3s and vids on it, man. I bet that thing could hold both our whole collections. This is gonna be awesome man!"
They connect the thing, get ready to start copying, and suddenly one of them says "Oh, WTF". The other one starts reading the instruction manual. After about a day trying to sort things out they both finally get it: "Hey dude, this thing's a piece of sh*t."
Of course by then it's too late to return it for a full refund. Or maybe the store will actually take these back, and in a few months dump their surplus inventory on eBay for ten cents on the dollar.
It's a sad but true fact that most of our economy runs by getting people to buy things they don't need, or misrepresenting products while depending upon most consumers to not read the fine print which they put in to cover their behinds.
timwhit
0
Well, I guess you could still pull the physical drive out and use it normally. Unless the physical drive itself has some special firmware.
Or unless it is like the loser's Seagate drive.
http://www.storageforum.net/forum/showthread.php?t=6851
timwhit
0
Or unless it is like the loser's Seagate drive.
If you don't care about damaging the enclosure it wouldn't be that hard to get the drive out.
sechs
0
Considering that the Raptor initially was failing so often that Western Digital ran out of replacements -- yet people still ate them up -- I don't think that their customer base is really that smart.
Considering WD still have a customer base at all seems to lend unequivocal credence to your conclusion about said customer base!
I have an original 2nd degeneration Raptor (WD 740GD) that is still running well years later. Were the original 37 GB drives unreliable? I wonder why there are no newer, faster WD Raptors?
Bozo
0
A quote from HardOCP:
"I have gotten e-mail all morning about this story claiming that the MyBook network storage system from Western Digital disables the sharing of movies and music. This isn’t true, the drive will hold / store / share anything you like. The problem the person had wasn’t with the drive, it was with the personal private network software from MioNET and even then it is only limited to internet file sharing. So the WD drive works fine, one of the optional features is to blame, so there is no need for wide scale panic."
RTFI!
Bozo :joker:
"I have gotten e-mail all morning about this story claiming that the MyBook network storage system from Western Digital disables the sharing of movies and music. This isn’t true, the drive will hold / store / share anything you like. The problem the person had wasn’t with the drive, it was with the personal private network software from MioNET and even then it is only limited to internet file sharing. So the WD drive works fine, one of the optional features is to blame, so there is no need for wide scale panic."
RTFI!
Bozo :joker:
They had something with the Raptor that no one else had (10k SATA). A 7.2k Ethernet is nothing special.
So is it probably just something from the dirty tricks dept. at Seagate or other competitor?
Tannin
0
Just a guy getting it monumentally wrong, by the sound of things. No need to panic or bring conspiracy theory into it. We can all go back to business as usual now, and continue buying just as many Western Digital drives as we were previous to this thread. (Which is to say none.)
GIANT
0
Nope. It's certainly for real:
'Surprised' Western Digital to revisit multimedia file sharing limits
The decision to block access, it says, was driven by legal fears
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9052339
Bozo
0
Stereodude
Not really a
Only if you install their software. The drive itself has no such limitations.
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
You obviously have no idea how many people will install everything in the box. One of the biggest problems I have in teaching computer building and home networking classes is to get people to ignore the install CDs as much as humanly possible.