WD Drive Utilities

WD Drive Utilities is a lightweight program designed to lend you a hand with managing and configuring your Western Digital external HDD.

First off, it is necessary to underline that the app does not recognize other manufacturers' drive, but rather works with a handful of external hard drives from the My Passport, easystore and My Book Western Digital series. Following a swift installation, you need to connect your WD drive in order to access the options and functions.

The utility enables you to perform several tests so you can determine whether the external drive is working properly. If the device has been sluggish lately, then you can opt for a complete drive test that analyzes each sector for error conditions.

The tool can also perform a lighter examination that focuses on detecting potential increases in temperature, noise or read and write errors, all of which can be indicators of an incoming failure and data loss.

Advanced users can tackle with the RAID configuration settings and view or change them accordingly. On a side note, the default setting for WD drives is either Stripper (0), Mirrored (1) or Individual Drives (JBOD). Following a quick scan, the app displays the status of the RAID, which can vary from healthy to degraded  or unknown and anything in between.

It is worth mentioning that the program permits you to modify the configuration, but you should expect to lose all applications installed and files you store on the external drive in the process. After you backup your important data, access the dedicated function and select the option for the mode that you want to change to.

In the eventuality that you own a Western Digital drive and want to be able to make the most out of your HDD, permanently delete data or change RAID configurations, then perhaps WD Drive Utilities could come in handy.