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Western Digital SmartWare Review


My very first 1 Terrabyte External Storage disk drive was a Western Digital.  That was many moons ago.  I was pleased with the price, the performance and even the ruggedness.  It is a bit clunky in design, but when I accidentally dropped it and cracked a bit of the plastic, my heart sank.  That was several years ago.  I plugged it back in, and it works fine to this day.

So I go to my local Future Shop and see a Western Digital 3 Terabyte drive for $129.  I snap it up.  It still has the same clunky design, but hey three terabytes for just over a hundred bucks -- such a deal!  I love Moores Law.

I unpacked it and it said that there was automagic backup software called SmartWare.  It would take all of the work of backups out of my hands.  I thought "what the heck" and installed it.  I was impressed that it started classifying my half terabyte laptop disk, and five hours later, it was all classified and backed up.  No big whoop.  I started the backup before going to bed at the crack of dawn.

Well sir or madam, when I next rebooted the computer, it was excruciating slow to boot. It was excruciating slow to kick Skype (I manage a coding team remotely).  Opening a spreadsheet was slow.  I thought WTF - the only thing that changed was the addition of the SmartWare.  I checked to make sure that I hadn't picked up a virus or bot.  I was clean so it had to be the backup software.

I uninstalled and my computer returned to normal speed.  I haven't decided whether to do the backups manually from now or, or to install and uninstall it after backups.  I am inclined to go manual, because another weird thing happened after the uninstall, but that is a different blog entry.  Later.

2 comments:

  1. Where's the date of the post?????

    ReplyDelete
  2. It would be interesting to know the software version .....

    By the way:
    The date of the post seems to be in the column on the right: 18 october 2013

    ReplyDelete