14 DAY TRIAL // Storage medium vendor Western Digital has released an urgent notice to owners of a WD external drive with instructions to uninstall all first-party software as it may cause data loss under OS X Mavericks.
Addressing all WD registered customers, the email in question states, “As a valued WD customer we want to make you aware of new reports of Western Digital and other external HDD products experiencing data loss when updating to Apple's OS X Mavericks (10.9).”
The company says it is “urgently” investigating the matter, noting that there’s a possible connection to applications supplied by Western Digital itself, including the WD Drive Manager, WD Raid Manager, and WD SmartWare.
“Until the issue is understood and the cause identified, WD strongly urges our customers to uninstall these software applications before updating to OS X Mavericks (10.9), or delay upgrading,” says the company.
Mac users who’ve already upgraded to Mavericks should also remove these applications as soon as possible and reboot their computer, according to the memo.
As a final note, Western Digital points out that WD Drive Manager, WD Raid Manager, and WD SmartWare are relatively old apps, and since there is some concern about their compatibility with Mavericks, the company has pulled them from its web site.
This is just a temporary precaution as WD investigates reports of data loss. The company will most likely update all three apps to work under Mavericks without issues.
The WD forum contains several threads with complaints about the data loss issue following the upgrade to Mavericks, so it’s clearly widespread. In two of these threads, WD assures customers that it is doing everything in its power to address the matter as soon as possible.
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