I recently saw a customer comment for an audio/USB adapter that stated “I’d have given this a perfect rating if they hadn’t included the crappy software.” Apparently, while the adapter did an absolutely bang-up job, the software that came with it to record audio was buggy, crash-prone, and difficult to use.
The good news is that for me, and for a lot of people buying that adapter, the included software was entirely secondary. But what happens when software that needs to be installed for using a product has issues?
Enter the Western Digital Mybook drive a client of mine bought. This drive looks sharp, and comes with Firewire ports and plenty of storage, so they bought one to use for backups. In the 1 Terabyte size it needs to be configured using their RAID utility before a Mac will properly recognize and use it. The RAID is internal to the drive casing, so that’s not an issue either. I’ve got to say that overall it seems to be a nice machine.
What is an issue is that a background service is installed – apparently to allow you to launch their crappy backup utility. By crappy I mean slow even on a brand-new Mac with lots of memory, flaky, and too simplified to make me comfortable using it.
Even that isn’t the showstopper.
The other day, only a few after installing two of the drives, a client of mine inserted a blank CD-R and the disk would not read. We literally spent hours trying to trace down the problem. It turns out that one of the services installed with the Mybook software can and often enough does prevent the system from properly reading blank CD media. Deleting the file starting the service will stop the problem. I got the fix from the following thread at the Apple support forums, and can say for a fact it worked for my client as well.
You’ll find the answer 13 posts down: