The morons on the BB website have only rated this at 2.5 out of 5 possible stars.
Why? Because they're rodeo cowboy! When these first came out, WD had put some really annoying software on the drive, built into the drive's firmware (so you couldn't just delete it). They took a LOT of grief about it, and did the right thing....they offered a quick and easy firmware update, to kill the offending software.

Result? A really nice drive, without any annoying software built into it. Literally, it took me less than 5 minutes to update the firmware on mine, and get rid of the garbage. Highly recommended drive!

Anyway, it is always on sale for $50 so this is not much a deal you need to hurry.. pass.

#1, I have the My Passport Elite and I used a tool from WD's website which I think is the one you're describing. It only hides the annoying software, but it doesn't actually allow you to remove it. The space is permanently lost (about 600M) worth and causes problems when trying to boot a computer from the drive.