Today I received three 1 TB single-interface USB 2 disks from Western Digital. The much anticipated, and angstfully dreaded, WDE1U10000E. Let’s hope they aren’t as much trouble as the WD500 series turned out to be.
Maybe in response to the failures of the internal power in those models they’ve changed the shape of this one (see picture). It’s a lot easier to handle now, and if you’ve got several of them, you can probably put them on top of each other. But no, looking around now I see that they offer the same amount of storage in the old MyBook series, so that people can safely void their warranties when they break.. Hmm.. Oh yeah, this hopefully working version’s called Elements instead of MyBook. Mental note to self. It also has a "Warranty void if removed" above one of its screws.
According to Western Digital’s own product page it’s all plug and play, and heck, the incredible USB 2.0 interface is even backwards compatible with USB 1! I’m soiling myself in excitement. It also says, and I quote: «Preformatted and ready to go». Great! This means that I can just go ahead and use it then. It’s only that it’s preformatted to FAT32 which has file size limitations well below the average Joe’s threshold. Come on guys. The first version of NTFS was released in 1993.
What I’m doing tonight? Formatting (5%)…
This is great for mr. Joe who doesn’t know computers and just plugs it in and use it. Suddenly his files can’t be copied onto his one terrabyte mass storage disk because it was preformatted to a filesystem from the 80s that won’t allow large files and gets fragmented by barely moving your cursor across a folder icon. Gotta wonder whether I’m already breaking the warranty by formatting it to NTFS, or if this is WD’s vain attempt to hide their NTFS issues?
3 terabyte of storage??? DAAAAAAAMN!!!! Mine’s only 250MB.
I’ve got 30 something users worth of backups on these things, so my smaller 3-500GB disks didn’t make the cut after a while.
Because of all your porn, eh? :P
I keep my porn on tape. For security.
But actually I’m gonna buy one of these for myself. I wouldn’t like to have to re-encode my entire CD collection if the current drive says goodnight.
I wouldn’t mind one, either.
On further inspection, all removable mass storage devices that are not always plugged in should stay with a stable filesystem such as FAT32 or ext3.
NTFS completely wears out removable devices!