I don’t really have an aversion to any specific hard drive company. They’re all equal as far as performance and durability. But sometimes you have to wonder what a company was thinking when they came up with a design.
Take the Western Digital “My Book” external drives. I’ve got a few and they serve me well. But the one that I keep at work to backup my laptop drive started to click loudly. After copying all my data off of it to another external drive, I decided to take the enclosure apart to get to the drive to gauge the possibility of replacing the drive with another (thus reusing the nice enclosure, which has Firewire 400 along with USB2 – I prefer FW).
Anyway, after several minutes of trying not to break any plastic, I was able to get the drive out.
Western Digital made it a huge pain in the ass to get the drive out. I don’t even know if I’ll be able to get the rubber grommet/seal that keeps the enclosure ‘clean’ back on. I should be able to replace the drive and actually reuse the enclosure. But it would have been nice if WD made the design a lot more user serviceable, keeping the enclosure held together with screws, as opposed to a clamshell snap together design.
Oh well.
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