Western Digital's 1TB World Edition Hard Drive is DRM-Crippled

[JacKz5o]

A member at Reg Hardware has reported that Western Digital's 1TB My Book World Edition remote-access hard drive does not share media files over network connections. Which is, the entire point behind the World Edition lineup of hard disk drives.

"Due to unverifiable media license authentication, the most common audio and video file types cannot be shared with different users using WD Anywhere Access."

Western Digital's list of banned file types encompasses over 35 extensions. This includes AAC, MP3, AVI, DivX, WMV, and Quicktime files. And why not - Windows TMP files too.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[zekrahminator]

I think I'm just going to buy a 1TB hard drive and an external enclosure off of Newegg, if I ever see the need for that amount of external/portable storage...

 

[Basard]

So basically, they have built in anti-piracy? Is this JUST over the "anywhere access" network? What exactly is the anywhere access? Is this basically some sort of way to say "we don't believe in piracy" without actually doing anything about it? Just to make themselves look good or something?

 

[[I.R.A]_FBi]

Same here, bun WD.

 

[phanbuey]

wow. WD, what a bunch of morons... WD is a business. There is no way that they decided to do this on their own, since that is essentially killing demand for the product. Me thinks someone paid them to do this (obvious detector turned off, put away...)

buuut whoOOo?

edit: not a big loss anyways, just read some reviews, apparently these drives are major crap to begin with haha.

 

[hat]

Umm... .zip isn't on the list
Put your media files into a .zip file!

 

[corwin155]

true

I think I'm just going to buy a 1TB hard drive and an external enclosure off of Newegg, if I ever see the need for that amount of external/portable storage...

yeah if i was going to buy one, id make my own from newegg too cheaper and it will do as i want not what someone else thinks i should do with my hardware

 

[AsRock]

A friend was telling me about it early this morning.
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2007/12/western-digital.html

 

[JacKz5o]

So basically, they have built in anti-piracy? Is this JUST over the "anywhere access" network? What exactly is the anywhere access? Is this basically some sort of way to say "we don't believe in piracy" without actually doing anything about it? Just to make themselves look good or something?

Kinda, the World Edition series has an Ethernet port on it which can be plugged into a NIC or router and allow people from pretty much all over the world to access the data. I guess WD think people might use this feature to share illegally downloaded music and videos without using a P2P or BitTorrent network and risk getting caught.

 

[Deleted member 24505]

Basically,they just wont sell many of 'em,its only any good for data storage.

 

[Mussels]

wow. WD, what a bunch of morons... WD is a business. There is no way that they decided to do this on their own, since that is essentially killing demand for the product. Me thinks someone paid them to do this (obvious detector turned off, put away...)

buuut whoOOo?

edit: not a big loss anyways, just read some reviews, apparently these drives are major crap to begin with haha.

got a friend with one of these... and yes its shit. its far too slow for a single drive, let alone a RAID setup (tested on USB 2.0 and firewire 400)

 

[Woah Mama!]

Fascists.

WTF is the point of a 1TB hard drive anyway? Unless they are used for servers I see no point of them even being sold on the public market. I mean, you have to be the Blue Beard of pirates to need that much storage at home.

 

[Nemesis881]

Built in anti-piracy thats pretty clever! Although I can see why...the only person that would need a 1TB hard drive is a bloody pirate anyway

 

[strick94u]

Built in anti-piracy thats pretty clever! Although I can see why...the only person that would need a 1TB hard drive is a bloody pirate anyway

Good point!

 

[JacKz5o]

Built in anti-piracy thats pretty clever! Although I can see why...the only person that would need a 1TB hard drive is a bloody pirate anyway

Not necessarily, I do video editing and a couple seconds of 300FPS 720P footage is about a GB

 

[stubbers]

Sigh... Quit overreacting... And Mussels, get your facts straight!

For starters this only effects the WD MyBook World Editions... The World part is very important in this case. The world edition drives feature built in UPNP software, blah blah blah, the USB/Firewire external drive (WD MyBook, notice the lack of world edition Mussels ) are a different setup, I can share whatever I want using this...

Secondly, all information I was able to dig up show that this doesn't affect the SMB sharing capabilities of the MyBoook World Edition, just Western Digitals funky access anywhere thingy...

Thirdly, software is only required to operate the Access Anywhere stuff... Not to use the drive.

Now enough backing up this product! I would not recommend this drive, or at least the one that I have.

1 - The drive transfer speed as noted by Mussels is far too slow for a raid external firewire drive (Mussels will no doubt tell you exactly how fast we clocked it). Personally it's fast enough for me, getting stuff on there is slow, but I only use it for storing multimedia files and not live editing or anything funky...

2 - Temparature control issues. Recently on hotter days (26 degrees room temp) the drive, even though well ventilated, overheats and shuts down.

3 - Noise issues. The inbuilt cooling, while innefective as mentioned above is also VERY noisy, this can be fixed partially by upgrading firmware, but on a hot summer night, it can still be heard over whatever movie I'm playing, whirring away...

4 - Management software. The software that comes with it is dodgy and constantly crashes (will not work at all on Vista X64)... But that's no real problem, as you only need the management software to upgrade firmware, and to set raid modes

So that's the deal with the MyBooks

As you can see, it aint as bad as you think... Chances are if you are into downloading multimedia, WD Anywhere aint for you anyway, I suggest you go looking for a good torrent!

Cheers,
Stubbers

 

[Darkmind]

Not necessarily, I do video editing and a couple seconds of 300FPS 720P footage is about a GB

I hope you mean 30FPS, and uncompressed

 

[eidairaman1]

sounds like a boycott of WD will ensue over this

 

[Mussels]

lol stubbers yelled at me i had his model of drive wrong.... but his is still slow as shit hah

oh and since stubbers asked, the peak was around 25MB/s over firewire - compared to the 63MB/s of my samsung 500GB, this raid fails hard... (using vistas transfer, to another 500GB samsung drive)

 

[JacKz5o]

I hope you mean 30FPS, and uncompressed

No, I meant 300FPS I make CS:S movies and the final FPS is usually 50 or 60 and if i do slow motion I need a really high FPS original clip or else the slowmo will stutter and look choppy. I use Huffy loseless compression to bring down the file size a bit.

 

[WarEagleAU]

Dude, with all the information out there one can obtain, 1tb is definitely needed. 1TB should last for quite some time as well.

 

[imperialreign]

But, I can't imagine the amount of crap people would collect with a 1TB drive . . . it's bad I've seen people that never use a disk cleanup or they never delete things or whatever . . .

could you imagine having to go through 1TB of pure rubbish cause someone wants you to find a vid clip they downloaded 2 years ago?!


Anyhow, I get the feeling this is more WD trying to cover their ass right now

 

[hat]

I imagine a hacked firmware will appear anyway.

 

[stubbers]

Already has Hat, there's a wiki about how to install Linux on it. Don't have the link but I think Mussels did.