"Want to use WD diagnostics? Buy Windows"... Linux lovers left out in the cold

Don't expect to run their bigger external drives either... They have some type of hypervisor thing on them that is not compatible with Linux. You can't get it off, not easily anyway... I tried. Can't reformat it for EXT2, 3, 4, whatever,... again, not easily anyway. Returned the drive,... Got a Seagate instead. Disappointing. WD drives are known for their reliability (and for being noisy).

Indeed, the last time I had a WD it survived quite long. Some other disks (amongst others a Seagate) literally went up in smoke.

Nowadays, I'm a happy Samsung / Hitachi customer (less noise!), and if WD doesn't support Linux, I'm glad there's plenty of choice to shop for other brands.

I own a 250GB USB external WD as well for backup reasons (just found out after scraping the dust). The 'funny' thing is, I can't use it to boot from USB. USB-sticks and my external USB-cardreader, to boot from USB, do work though. I was able to format the external WD HD as ext3 though, and make 2 partitions on it.

Thanks for letting me know about this hypervisor thing, I have to look into it. Are you saying if I buy a 2TB WD drive I can't format it as a 2GB EXT4 USB drive?

@tmx: Indeed. They run some sort of embedded samba-like thingy providing shared over USB and even letting you configure RAID (for the multi-drive external USB drives). But it all has to be handled through their application, which only runs Windows.

Go read some reviews over at newegg. You'll get the gist.