Western Digital My Passport Essential 320

I bought the Western Digital 'My Passport Essential 320' to use as a backup drive among my MacBookPro and iMac. It comes with 'Smartware' installed, which is their backup utility. Nice idea, but it makes moving the Passport between my MacBookPro and my iMac very difficult; it doesn't always show up on the next machine or gives you access errors, etc. I think it's a case of a little too much help.

Using the Mac 'Disk Utility' to re-stripe/format doesn't get rid of the 'built-in' Smartware utility.

You need to go here and follow these instructions:

http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/updates/?family=wdsmartwareutilitiesmac

There's a firmware upgrade, then use the 'VCD Manager' to get rid of the 'Smartware' for good.

One more note: Now that I've formatted the Passport 320 it will show up on my Snow Leopard desktops on my iMac, MacPro and MacBook as it should. It does not, however, show up on my older PowerBook G4 (10.5.8) I tried formatting it there thinking I could use it on both the the Leopard and Snow Leopard machines, but no dice: won't even format it. So if I've got to get something off the Passport320 to the old PowerBookG4, I network to it through one of the 10.6 machines and it sees it fine.

Just wanted to pass this info on if you've bought the Passport Essential 320 and are having issues with it.

Let Time Machine do the backing up, not the 'Smartware'.