DRM Controlled Hard Drives

Tonight I personally lost some faith in the hard drive giant Western Digital.  I was reading an article that was talking about the new MyBook 1TB external drive.  Currently there are work-arounds for this but when you install the drive and the software that it comes with it does not allow you to share media files like MP3, WMV across your network.  These are not the only 2 extensions that are disallowed, there are actually more than 30 that are restricted.

I am not sure why Western Digital thinks it is their place to police the files and what is shared on a network.  In the future I can see this software being installed on the drive hidden from view where it will take a nice little utility that someone hacks together to remove the DRM protection.  I would be very surprised to see a drive that had DRM protection that was not removable by flashing a ROM chip or clearing a partition but it looks like that is the way of the future.

I guess I will have to stop buying Western Digital and move over to Seagate drives.  You can read more on this Wired post.