Ha! Brilliant.

I love the "what do customers ultimately buy" bit, showing the more normal prices.

Did Amazon randomise it's prices for april fools day?

I was kind of scared... I was thinking I screwed up something, since lot of reviewers say that the software is mandatory. But it seems that it is not!

Anyway guys, thanks for all the replies. :) If anybody has any questions about the drive, fire them up.

I've been looking to buy a passport myself. Is this a good one to get? I don't need any special software, just something I can drag and drop my files onto and won't break after a month.

It allows drag and drop, and apparently there is no need for extra software. Its very small too. Really very small, I was expecting it to be bigger.

By the way, guys, to properly eject, I just need to right click on it, click eject, and then remove the USB cable, right? (just like with a USB flash memory?)

It's just like ordinary hard drive, it's only connected with usb cable, you can do anything a normal hdd would do with it :D
@KavazovAngel - yes, right click on it and eject to be completely safe it finished reading/writing with your files and to be sure it powers down nicely.
One of my friends bought one for his mac 6 month ago and so far he's very satisfied, WD tends to make good drives ;)

This is a harmless side-effect of formatting Western Digital drives; the lower-end models don't even ship with software to begin with. Should you wish to restore the SmartWare software you can download it from this knowledge base entry.

I personally wouldn't bother getting SmartWare back, however; Windows 7's own Backup and Restore does everything and more (albeit without the glossy interface). Its backups hook into Previous Versions and other recovery features and are compressed as standard ZIP (for selective backups) or VHD (for full system images).

Cool, thanks. I was asking because the drive is actually still spinning even after ejecting it. :)

Well, the latest Western Digital 1 TB external HD I purchased has some shitty backup software on its own virtual CD, something the drive firmware would load automatically once the device is connected to my laptop and so it couldn't have been deleted from the HD by simply formatting it.

The software was there. But nothing started to install / run automatically.

Anyway, I installed the latest firmware for it after connecting it to my lappy, and then did the normal right-click -> Format. The format worked as expected, the software was removed from the drive.

WD probably have changed their mind and made the software removeable in newer versions.

Interesting news: I don't give a shit about "simple" backup software for simple newbie minds, so I'd like to have no damn virtual CD on my computer by plugging an USB drive :-P

You know, the even weirder thing is that Autorun should have been disabled by a security update ages ago, so that software shouldn't of started automatically anyway.

Let me guess though, Windows XP user, right?

Nope, Vista. The problems isn't the Autorun, the problem is the presence of the Virtual CD stuff on its own :-P

Yea, but it appears that it can easily be removed by formatting the HDD. At least that was the case with my model.

I have an older WD 250gb Passport (Bout 3-4 years old). I used to use the software on it but it randomly deleted some files off of it, so I never trusted it again. I wiped the entire drive and now use it like a regular flash drive.

I doubt WD has put things in place to prevent you from doing it, but wiping it and using it as a flash drive should work.

THIS

AND THIS.

I have the 750 gig version and it is apparently hard coded into the USB passport so you can not remove it. So basically I do not have a 750 gig I have a 680ish gig PLUS it is embarrassing when I use it to display my work (I do film for a school) and plug it into the computer and have to wait upwards of 15 minutes for the 2gig ram Win7 basic computers to search/load/download the files to run the stupid firmware backup so I can say "No." THEN get into the drive itself. FAIL.