Well I used to buy WD external disk because I worked in a company who always used those disk, so I got used to. But I just bought three disks and I not gonna buy more WD disk for a long time.
WD disk now contains a space (I don't have the size right here, I'll update this later), taken from the total space of your disk, with a soft called WD SmartWare. Of course, this software runs only on Windows XP/Vista/7 (and maybe on Mac OS X, but I'm not sure and I don't care). That's not a big problem, well I thought, as I don't mind having a software or not, what I buy was a disk drive. The real problem is that this space, with the software, is seen as a compact disk and is read-only.
In fact the firmware is made to disallow you to remove those software from the disk, to always show that CD-Rom drive alike and finally to pop-up for that autorun every time you plug the disk in. Is that what I bought ? No. I bought a disk drive, accessible via USB, no more than a disk drive. But I got something with a weird firmware that eat up space on my disk, space I cannot erase so I cannot use.
After some searching I found out that there was a way to remove (or hide) this stuff, but unfortunately only from Windows XP/Vista/7 or Mac OS X. I don't own any Windows license and if I want to access a Windows computer, I need to take it at my work. But it means one hour of public transport with my backup disk ? No, not really possible.
I also tried to get in touch with WD support. I asked if there was a way around, but they just said “no” (in a polite and diplomatic way, of course) and marked the problem as “solved” on their tracking system. So I asked more questions (would they do this forever, do they think to help GNU/Linux user one day, …) and reopened the issue, they just marked resolved again (without answering) … They just don't care about GNU/Linux users.
So thank WD, but I'm not gonna buy anything from you for a long, long time …