Yes.. Digital My Western Book
The software on my drive (purch Apr 2010) does not force an installation of Smartware. There is now an option to not install the software, which then leads it to only install drivers. It does not prompt for the software install after that and shows as a straight drive that I could drag and drop onto. One nice feature is the drive will power down if the computer is turned off or the usb cord unplugged. Then it turns on automatically when the computer is turned back on, or is plugged into another computer.
See below for a way to enable password protection of the drive without leaving Smartware installed.
The virtual CD can be turned off from within the software, or through a separate download from the WD website. It turned off, then back on just fine. Other people mentioned formatting the drive to get full capacity afterwards, but I didn’t try that. Instructions for how to do that are at the WD website.
One thing to clear up is the people saying the virtual CD takes up 70 GB. It takes up less than 500 MB. The 70 GB apparent deficiency relates to the way Windows reports hard drive sizes, not the virtual CD.
A 1 TB drive does not show up as 1,000 GB, but rather as 931 GB in Windows. Right click any drive (or even a file) and go to properties and compare the capacity in bytes to the capacity in MB or GB right next to it. They are not the same. I think you have to divide 1 TB by 1,024 to get how many KB it is, then by 1,024 again to get how many MB, then 1,024 again to get how many GB. So 930 GB for this drive is really 1 TB, minus about 1GB due to the file structure and virtual CD. Again, it does appear you can re-format and claim back the space the virtual CD space back, but I kept it for a specific reason I’ll mention later.
After I verified it worked as a straight drive, I tried Smartware. The main problem with Smartware is there’s no way to selectively backup certain folders or even just pick a different backup interval besides continuous backup.
Western Digital My Book