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.
