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Western Digital's Anti-piracy efforts

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7136069.stm BBC News, 12/12/2007 One of the world's largest hard disk manufacturers has blocked its customers from sharing online their media files that are stored on networked drives.

Western Digital says the decision to block sharing of music and audio files is an anti-piracy effort.

The ban operates regardless of whether the files are copy-protected, or a user's own home-produced content.


-- In my opinion, the employees of WD, seemingly representing their company appropriately, have always had a much higher opinion of their company, policies and products than they have of their customers and this policy is a snapshot of that attitude. In brief, it might be phrased as, "Screw you, we're WD."

-- A recommended correction: "which, if potentially misleading, is technically correct;" should read, "which, while technically correct, is deceptive." The reason for this is obvious: the drive speed doesn't vary, therefore, a four RPM increase is not worth nothing, unless the noting is accurate and for accuracy's sake and this is obfuscation for misrepresentation's sake. WD clearly wants to deceive their customers into thinking this drive is significantly faster than a 5400 RPM drive. Increasing the rotational speed by four RPM is not enough to notice a difference in any discernible way and the manufacturing costs incurred in doing so cannot be justified except by a sales increase obtained by deceit. 184.7.105.97 (talk) 04:41, 4 October 2011 (UTC)

The WD software flap was 4 years ago. Is it even online anymore? Sounds like a non-issue, even at the time, since the solution was simple: don't use their software. Regardless, how does this have to do with improving this article? - Denimadept (talk) 15:31, 4 October 2011 (UTC)

specs?

what are the recent specs? 69.138.166.53 (talk) 03:17, 2 February 2008 (UTC) 69.138.166.53 (talk) 03:17, 2 February 2008 (UTC) 69.138.166.53 (talk) 03:17, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

DRM

And what about some new WD HADD's DRM software, unabling the sharing of files from the drive? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.62.6.58 (talk) 18:13, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

It's FD1771, not WD1771

The first FDC was named FD1771, and not WD1771. All references should be changed. I didn't do it because they link to an article with the same, which also should be changed. I don't know exactly how to make all these changes without breaking the links. Somebody more familiar with Wiki should do it. --Ijor (talk) 01:33, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

Disambiguation link repair - (You can help!)

Used WikiCleaner to update missing pages and old redirect pages. Please do not revert! Also, un-abbreviated a few technical terms, for people, like me, that are not in the technology field. Thanks! Funandtrvl (talk) 16:38, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Competitors

Should SimpleTech be listed as a competitor? If so, you'd have to list every company that sells an external hard drive (LaCie, Iomega, Buffalo...). Also, shouldn't it link to SimpleTech's Wikipedia page and not an external website? --Ponde (talk) 14:21, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

I was actually about to comment on this myself. SimpleTech uses Western Digital hard drives in their external drives so I see them less as a competitor and more as a vendor. SmartSped (talk) 18:32, 27 April 2009 (UTC)



How to Repair 3TB hard drive It shows only - 1.99TB.??? First this problem does not come From Yours WD hard drive. All versions Windows -XP ,VISTA ,WIN - 7 suffer Amateurs programmer.

In implication all operational system have - 2TB LIMIT. 

A limit It means that if you buy more huge from 2TB hard drive

Your Windows 7 It will receive only 2TB.

The only that can It helps out to overcome the issue is Linux -2010. Linux -2010 is purfekt operational system after quick installation You can separate Yours WD hard drive to 3 pises of 1TB. Dont Forget to separate on NTFS.

After that install Stupid Windows and Play. I personali will walk With Linux -2010. 

On WESTERN DIGITAL I will recommend to Give With

Each hard disk CD on Linux.


Georgie M. From Republic BULGERIA — Preceding unsigned comment added by 46.35.162.115 (talk) 07:40, 8 October 2011 (UTC)

Duplicate pages

This page is the same as an already existing page Western Digital I do not think using another campanies name ie. General Digital (http://www.generaldigital.com) is appropriate when another page already exists that is duplicate and has the name of the company already. I personally think this page should be content stripped and have one made for the General Digital company if that's what needs to be done, I wouldn't mind writing it myself if need be.

--Cayden Ryan (talk) 17:41, 18 May 2010 (UTC)


On this note, no one has deleted the duplicate page, I think I may tag this page for deletion. --Cayden Ryan (talk) 17:01, 13 July 2010 (UTC)

I'm sorry I'm not sure I understand... This page is Western Digital. There is a redirect page from General Digital to here, but as far as I can see there is no duplicate page. Are you saying that the redirect is inappropriate? TastyCakes (talk) 17:15, 13 July 2010 (UTC)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Digital and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Digital are the same exact page, two different urls, one needs to be the actual company page, and since the name of the company is Western Digital, that is probably the best solution. --Cayden Ryan (talk) 16:25, 14 July 2010 (UTC)
The redirect is not appropriate as the company no longer goes by that name and there is a company that is better associated with this page as it's name is General Digital and they have a solid reason to be considered to have a page for. The company (General Digital) was the first company in the world to create a microprocessor-based payphone that derived its power from a standard phone line and also the company was awarded the patent for a liquid-cooled sunlight readable backlight. Cayden Ryan (talk) 18:05, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

Compatibility issues?

A user (most recently 59.94.130.188, but the IP address seems to change in 59.94.*.* day to day) has inserted content into several Western Digital-related articles about non-compatibility with Open Source operating systems. To avoid an edit war, does anyone know about such non-compatibilities? (Note that Western Digital simply not mentioning compatibility with Linux doesn't count, I use Western Digital hard-drives in my Linux machines, and I've never had problems.) —Preceding unsigned comment added by PerryTachett (talk • contribs) 20:53, 6 November 2010 (UTC)

I've (the guy stating the compatibility issues) now stated here that the drives are *officially* incompatible (i.e it doesn't matter if they actually work with your opensource OS or not; that said, even I'm using a WD hdd in my laptop.), is that wrong?... I've provided the source in the western digital sites themselves. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 59.94.147.190 (talk) 06:48, 9 November 2010 (UTC)
The sources cited from WD themselves don't support what you're saying. Both the "WD compatibility summary" PDF files state that the product in question has been tested with, among others, Fedora and Ubuntu. I've looked at these for a few other WD drives models and haven't found any so far that don't say this. If you're talking about the external drives, Linux can use any USB hard drives, the "Windows/Mac" thing simply means you can buy these drives ready formatted for use with either, whereas to use with Linux you would have to format them as normal. Miremare 14:39, 9 November 2010 (UTC)
Yes I had stated "All Western Digital products except WD RE4-GP, VelociRaptor series of hard drives". I've provided the sources proving that the 2 HDDs are compatible... nothing more. If these 2 products are officially compatible doesn't mean all WD products are officially compatible. That basically means if you call up WD stating your HDD is not working on Linux/BSD/Plan9 etc... they'll say they do not support the OS officially. Even if they don't say, they have the rights to say and the consumer cant do anything.
Notice the emphasis on the term 'officially'.
"I've looked at these for a few other WD drives models and haven't found any so far that don't say this."
Links?
"the "Windows/Mac" thing simply means you can buy these drives ready formatted for use with either, whereas to use with Linux you would have to format them as normal."
Refference?
You basically mean if a Wireless USB dongle has not written 'Linux compatible' then it means it actually works on Linux except that they have not provided the drives in the disk.
Another example is with Transcend products, they say it's Linux, mac, and Windows compatible does that mean they come partitioned with 3 primary partitions having FS ext4, hfs and fat?
I think the crucial distinction here is between "officially not supported", and "not officially supported". The first is a relevant fact, whereas the second is mere trivia. Lots of things aren't officially supported. For example, cooking Annie's Homegrown brand microwave mac and cheese in a pot (rather than in the microwave) is not officially supported. However, it is not officially not supported. The latter fact would perhaps be relevant on said article, whereas the former is not really relevant. This is simply my opinion. To avoid an edit war, I would like to reach consensus as to this point. PerryTachett (talk) 15:51, 10 November 2010 (UTC)
Unlike the example of cooking Annie's Homegrown recipe, this is a controversial issue and does not have billions of possibilities. Unlike other hard drive manufacturers like Hitachi (which only claims and requires the compatibility of the interface with the OS), Transcend and till some extent, even Seagate, this company doesn't mention anything other than Mac/Windows. Thus before buying their product there's no way to see if the device will actually work under Linux (what if it requires Windows specific drivers?) except by doing guess work. Adding this fact to this article will warn potential consumers about this. WD is by now completely ignoring the open source. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 59.94.140.211 (talk) 16:40, 10 November 2010 (UTC)
Okay, I didn't know that other manufacturers explicitly mention Linux, and WD stands out by mentioning it less. That does make this more notable and less misleading. Can we ("we" at this point basically being me, 59.94.*.*, and Miremare) find a way to rephrase "Open Source is officially not supported (except...)" that makes it less misleading? For example, can we find a citation of a WD hard-drive that is incompatible or officially not compatible (distinct from not officially compatible), then write a line like "However, some WD products, such as ____ are incompatible(cite)", or "However, some WD products, such as ____, are officially not compatible(cite)". If no such citation can be found, I have to agree with Miremare that no such section belongs on Wikipedia. Thanks for being so civil about this, despite the fact that I initially used the inflammatory edit summary "reverting flagrant falsehood" for removing your edit. PerryTachett (talk) 03:46, 11 November 2010 (UTC)
In reply to points one by one:
  • "If these 2 products are officially compatible doesn't mean all WD products are officially compatible". You're back to front on this one. Both references state that the drives in question are Linux compatible. What you haven't done is provide a source that states any WD drives aren't compatible.
  • "That basically means if you call up WD stating your HDD is not working on Linux/BSD/Plan9 etc... they'll say they do not support the OS officially. Even if they don't say, they have the rights to say and the consumer cant do anything." We don't base article content on hypothetical things that might happen, but on citable sources. If you've got something to cite on this, please do.
  • "Links?" In addition to the two you cited, there's this and this. This article from WD's own knowledge base might also be of interest. I'm sorry, but there is simply no question of Western Digital drives not being compatible with Linux.
  • External drives: WD sells external drives pre-formatted for Windows or Mac (with Firewire on the Mac-specific versions), which is why they are labelled as such on their web site. Again, Linux is perfectly able to use USB hard drives, whether made by Western Digital, Seagate, Samsung, or whoever. As a Linux user yourself, you are no doubt aware of this. If you think that WD drives somehow cannot be used with Linux then this is an unusual claim and needs a source.
  • "You basically mean if a Wireless USB dongle has not written 'Linux compatible' then it means it actually works on Linux except that they have not provided the drives in the disk." Yes, any USB device will work in Linux if there are Linux drivers for it. But USB hard drives are different because they use the USB mass storage standard, which is supported by all modern operating systems, so they don't need extra drivers. Miremare 20:14, 10 November 2010 (UTC)
Reply --
  • "You're back to front on this one. Both references state that the drives in question are Linux compatible. What you haven't done is provide a source that states any WD drives aren't compatible."
It's important for a company to state the compatibility of a product with an OS. So if someone has decided to buy a product you don't expect the potential customer to be hunting around to see if the device is not compatible; WD has not realized this, lot's of other manufactures have. If one decides to buy a WD product they expect you to search for unreliable sources off Google to check their product compatibility with the 2nd or 3rd most used OS. Usually the potential customer will go by the manufactures word. That's why Linux users don't prefer cannon printers, although most of them do work with CUPS. That's exactly the the reason why HP and other companies write about this on their official sites like that of hplip. As I had already said -
"Thus before buying their product there's no way to see if the device will actually work under Linux (what if it requires Windows specific drivers?) except by doing guess work."
Furthermore this is not a question of if the device works or not, it's about what the company says officially. It's competitors claim they do work on at least 1 opensource OS -- Linux, and WD does not.
  • "We don't base article content on hypothetical things that might happen, but on citable sources. If you've got something to cite on this, please do."
That was one of the disadvantages that I stated of not having a compatibility summary of the product under question. Your points have absolutely no relevance with what I'm talking about here -- What the company says officially.
And yeah, I have a citable source -- http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=804&lang=en
How do you know this works under Linux? -- Checking out my blog and various unoffical sources? What if the product is absolutely new to the market? Same is the case with block storage devices -- How do you know they (or some of them) do not require special Windows specific drivers? Do you own their whole product range?
*"In addition to the two you cited, there's this and this. This article from WD's own knowledge base might also be of interest. I'm sorry, but there is simply no question of Western Digital drives not being compatible with Linux."
Again, I've stated they are officially not compatible... there's no official source stating that their products do work under any Opensource platform. You gotta rely on google and various blogs scattered here and there to see if they work.
* "External drives: WD sells external drives pre-formatted for Windows or Mac (with Firewire on the Mac-specific versions), which is why they are labelled as such on their web site. Again, Linux is perfectly able to use USB hard drives, whether made by Western Digital, Seagate, Samsung, or whoever. As a Linux user yourself, you are no doubt aware of this. If you think that WD drives somehow cannot be used with Linux then this is an unusual claim and needs a source."
As I had stated here - "Another example is with Transcend products, they say it's Linux, mac, and Windows compatible does that mean they come partitioned with 3 primary partitions having FS ext4, hfs and fat?" Again -- I'm only concerned about what the company claims officially.
*"Yes, any USB device will work in Linux if there are Linux drivers for it. But USB hard drives are different because they use the USB mass storage standard, which is supported by all modern operating systems, so they don't need extra drivers."
I know that and I had stated that - "Unlike other hard drive manufacturers like Hitachi (which only claims and requires the compatibility of the interface with the OS), Transcend and till some extent, e...."
i.e WD has not claimed that they are generic block storage devices like what Hitachi did. If a device uses interface like IDE, SATA, SCSI, USB etc... it doesnt mean they do not require specialized drivers. They might be requiring it, and WD does not claim that they do not require it. Instead they have just listed the OS with which they are compatible, making people believe they do require specialized drivers... or actually leave them guessing. BTW blocks storage devices or any device or interface do require drives and at times there are multiple drivers for the same interface. In Linux they can be optionally build into the Kernel or as modules.

@ PerryTachett

  • "For example, can we find a citation of a WD hard-drive that is incompatible or officially not compatible (distinct from not officially compatible), then write a line like "However, some WD products, such as ____ are incompatible(cite)", or "However, some WD products, such as ____, are officially not compatible(cite)"."
As I had stated before, if a company does not state an OS in it's compatibility summary, it usually means they are actually not compatible. Again I'm quoting what I previously said -- "You basically mean if a Wireless USB dongle has not written 'Linux compatible' then it means it actually works on Linux except that they have not provided the drives in the disk." In reality most of them don't work. So you have to 'guess' if the work or not under OSS. If we go by your saying, all Wireless dongles, printers, scanners or any exotic hardware works on all operating systems. Thus you can buy anything that you want and expect it to work under things like Plan9 and React OS
Overall, I think this will settle as the following --
"Although most Western Digital products do work on opensource operating systems like Linux, BSD, etc... For most it's products, Western Digital has not officially claimed they they do work Under the same. Thus a potential consumer will have to guess it's compatibility with operating systems like Linux." (59.94.128.201 (talk) 13:51, 11 November 2010 (UTC)).
  • "It's important for a company to state the compatibility of a product with an OS" - that's just it, those drive compatibility PDFs do state that they are Linux compatible. Also see this other WD knowledge base article which is specifically about the limits of Linux technical support they provide to customers. The question a potential buyer needs to ask isn't "do Western Digital hard drives work with my OS?" but "does my OS support IDE/SATA hard drives?", because that's all WD drives are, they don't have their own proprietary standards requiring special drivers or something, they're just regular HDDs. There may be very basic hardware incompatibility if the motherboard it's being paired with doesn't have the right ports, but that's not a WD issue. And if there are OS's out there that don't support either IDE or SATA (and to be perfectly honest, if there are, they're not important enough to warrant mentioning here), then, again, that isn't a WD issue but an issue with the OS in question.
  • "Your points have absolutely no relevance with what I'm talking about here -- What the company says officially.". If the company said that their products were not compatible with Linux I could understand your point, but they don't. Seriously, if the world's second largest manufacturer of hard drives made drives that weren't compatible with Linux, someone would have noticed and written about it. If you want to add this section to the article, you need to be able to support it - and the burden of evidence is with you to prove what you say is true, not with me to prove otherwise.
  • "And yeah, I have a citable source -- http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=804&lang=en How do you know this works under Linux?" - You know it works under Linux because Linux supports USB floppy drives, just as all other modern OS's do. The drivers that WD provides on that page are for Windows 98, an OS that didn't support the USB mass storage standard either. What is or isn't compatible out of the box with a 13-year old operating system is pretty irrelevant. But even so, it's an operating system issue, not a Western Digital issue. In fact, modern computers will recognise, and indeed boot from, USB floppies before an OS has even loaded.
  • "WD has not claimed that they are generic block storage devices like what Hitachi did. If a device uses interface like IDE, SATA, SCSI, USB etc... it doesnt mean they do not require specialized drivers. They might be requiring it, and WD does not claim that they do not require it." The fact that they don't specify that their USB hard drives don't need drivers in no way indicates that they do. They make no mention of drivers, they offer no drivers to download. The bottom line is that support for USB hard drives is already included in all modern operating systems, including Linux. Do you know of any USB hard drives that don't work without special drivers? If WD's USB drives use a non-standard interface or something and require extra drivers, where are your sources for that? Please, if you have sources stating that WD drives aren't compatible with Linux, add them. But creative interpretation of what WD's website doesn't say proves nothing, and proof is what we need. Miremare 20:01, 11 November 2010 (UTC)
http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=987&p_created=1053009707&p_sid=e4aCONek&p_accessibility=0&p_redirect=&p_srch=1&p_lva=5655&p_sp=cF9zcmNoPTEmcF9zb3J0X2J5PSZwX2dyaWRzb3J0PSZwX3Jvd19jbnQ9MTgsMTgmcF9wcm9kcz0wJnBfY2F0cz0wJnBfcHY9JnBfY3Y9JnBfc2VhcmNoX3R5cGU9YW5zd2Vycy5zZWFyY2hfZm5sJnBfcGFnZT0xJnBfc2VhcmNoX3RleHQ9bGludXg!&p_li=&p_topview=1
Ok, that's a good reference. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 59.94.128.201 (talk) 03:14, 12 November 2010 (UTC)

The logo used on this page at present is misshapen, probably due to being autotraced from a raster image. I uploaded a smaller, higher quality version to http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WesternDigitalLogo.svg but have no idea how to get that into this article. I hope this helps. WestDig (talk) 12:58, 25 May 2012 (UTC)

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