Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

These WD Hard drives with "WD Smartware" are a huge pain. They have an extra very small partition that acts like a Virtual CD drive. When you plug the hard drive into your computer, WD smartware software runs. It can be very annoying and sometimes can cause problems. For example, It won't work with you PS3 until you get the WD Smartware off. The problem is WD meant for this extra partition to be permanent. They created a way for you to "disable" the software, but the partition is still there, and it still won't work with your PS3. So, I spent a good 4 or 5 hours trying to format this thing to get rid of the extra partition. It was difficult. The normal windows disk utility couldn't do it (I couldn't get it to work on my Mac either), so i had to download and try a few different disk formatting utilities. That was after spending hours doing what the WD website recommended. Eventually I got it cleaned up and it does work on my PlayStation. I'm really disappointed in Western Digital for trying to force this on their customers without out a simple way to get rid of it. Final verdict: If you don't mind installing the WD Smartware on every computer you want to use the hard drive on, and don't plan to use this with a PS3, then this hard drive is probably fine. The WD Smartware offers some okay stuff like password protection. BUT, if you want a normal external hard drive that acts just like a thumb drive with no surprises, get something else and make sure it does not have "WD Smartware" on it.