[ijoselito]

I would try something else before buying one of these. If you research a little bit the internet you will find lots of users that have been let down by these drives and WD in general.

My own experience was losing all my data, my pictures and my projects for university, I had two WD drives, one to store my data and one to back it up. Both failed within two days, they were just six months old. WD support WILL only change your faulty drive for another "refurbished" drive. I suppose they have hundreds of them going around their disappointed customers. Just look in blogs and other reviews rather than people who are trying to sell you something.

WD SUCKS. WD SUCKS A LOT.

Anything will be better than buying one of these knowing already that your data is in jeopardy...

For those who already own, buy other drive and make a copy to secure your data. Do it before it happens.

PD: These drives are reported to be faulty in both Windows and Macs. Apple users seem more prune to problems, though.

ijoselito.

[HouseSold]

The Buffalo branded external drives: http://shop1.outpost...XjlY1JY1Y8ZDELg.node3?site=sr:SEARCH:MAINRSLTPG
are available in various sizes and contain a proper SATA drive and interface. The price is back up currently, but drops to around $99 every couple of weeks or so.
We purchased several Firewire 400/USB models in 500gb recently. Buffalo uses Samsung, Hitachi, Western Digital and Seagate branded drives randomly. A call to tech support (very good and helpful BTW) verified this but couldn't offer a suggestion of how to tell before purchasing and opening.
We typically zero all data and reformat before using. The Samsung is the quietest of the choices above and runs the coolest.
We saw the immediate difference in the 400 firewire speed over USB, especially in the zero all data process.

YMMV

[anothersite]

You did not say what your WD hard disk partition formatting is. The WD hard disk needs to be partitioned using Apple Partition Map in order to boot your PPC machine. Selecting the WD hard disk in Disk Utility will show the Partition Map Scheme at the bottom of the window. Partition type can be changed in Disk Utility after selecting Partition tab. Select Options.

[muchomac]

These new WD editions, whether Studio or Home edition all use 5400RPM drives, this is why the benchmarks are lower than other external drive companies that typically use 7200RPM drives.
I'm surprised people don't have problems with WD drives. The Apple and WD discussion forums have tons of OS X users reporting problems with the drive not waking up from sleep mode and other issues.
I have a WD Pro II 1TB RAID drive and I'll never buy WD again due to the problems and noise of the drive. A much better solution is to buy an external enclosure and supply your own drives, anything goes wrong, easy to replace. Good luck dealing with WD Support - after two exchanges I was still getting bad refurbished drives under warranty.

[Tom Snyder]

It was formatted as an Apple Partition Map.
I actually tried both the Intel boot and the PPC boot partitions at one point.

[anothersite]

Curious. I would probably clone again to the WD hard drive with APM for G5 booting and make sure the clones are set to be bootable. The problem is probably something simple. Maybe someone in the help forums can put you onto the simple step that is being overlooked, because it is hard to believe your disk would not boot a Mac unless the disk was defective.

I have a pair of WD My Books (500 GB and 320 GB) that I routinely use to boot and clone Intel and PPC Macs (making sure the partitions and OSes line up, of course). These disks have been reliable for me over the past 8 months.

[Tom Snyder]

Thanks for your help.
I had given up on this drive but I'm cloning the drive again right now.

I have another firewire drive from granite digital that uses an extension to work correctly.
I now wondering if that is keeping this drive from working, although it doesn't effect my other firewire drives.
It will boot my Intel Mini from both the firewire and USB ports.

[mrbach]

Also, never, ever, download a firmware update from Western Digital and try to update your drive.
It will ruin your drive and there will be no technical support. Just Google MyBook firmware update, and read the horror stories.
It wouldn't be so bad if WD actually took care of customers, but they do not seem capable.

[Walt_Basil]

Not necessarily a reply to you, mrbach, just replying in general. Maybe I've been lucky, or simply those who've read this article have had bad experiences and wanted to share them. I've had nothing but good experiences with WD hard drives. External. Internal. Eternal. Whatever. They've all lasted many years, and I have never lost data because of them. I don't just go out and buy WD either. I buy whatever I think is the best deal, not necessarily the price point. I've had some of each and they've all been good to me, and I'm not basing any buying decisions on what I read here.

I sincerely think that had this been a seagate, iomega, maxtor (yes, I know... now seagate) drive, we still would have the same horror stories. It doesn't really matter who made this. Whoever had bad experiences with whatever particular model had been mentioned would have come on the forum and told us to stay away from model X because they had a bad experience with it. Oh, and looky here: google it and you'll see all the negative stories from product X. Well duh... everyone knows that teed off people will go through more trouble to bemoan their tragedies than people who are perfectly happy with their product X.

A couple comments to comments I've seen already:

I like the spin down feature of it this particular MyBook. I don't care that I can't set the time. I only use this for my Time Machine, and we all know that runs in the background without any particular input or waiting on my end. So how long it takes or how slow it is compared to drive X means nothing to me.

5400. 7200. I don't care. Time Machine yo. I don't wait for it. It just happens.

I care nothing of firmware updates. If it's working for me now, I'm not going to go out of my way to update something like that. I learned in the mid 90s not to mess with firmware unless absolutely necessary.

I'm not going to put my entire faith in Time Machine however. I do have backup plans that capture all my settings and no-can-do-without data and stores them on my .Mac. and other less-important data get's backed up to another backup drive on the network weekly.

Bottom line is, always have a backup, and always replace before tragedy might occur. I've been lucky and always work that way. Drive gets over 2 or 3 years old - I replace it. By that time, the new one is 10 times as spacious as the one it is replacing anyways.

I always buy ahead. I "run out" of deordorant, I'm not really out. I've got 2 full cans standing by to replace the currently used can. I am never really out of it. I operate the same way with most my computer equipment. First possible sign of trouble, there's a brand new spare sitting here ready to take its place.

[pcharles]

Western Digital have always replied to my questions. Their responses have not always been all that helpful, particularly with the button manager and drive sleep on my 1TB My Book Pro (RAID) because they do not have Mac diagnostic software. They say the strange sleep behavior is "normal, but I should plug it into a Windows machine and run the diagnostic software. If the diagnostic software reveals a problem it will be replaced. Now I just need access to Windows machine.

[pcharles]

The fan is definitely noisy, but I have found my drives to be quite reliable, and have actually had more problems with my LaCie drives (Porsche 250GB), but in that case it was a problem with the internal drive. I simply pulled the drive out and sent it back for replacement. Unlike Western Digital, LaCie do not make drives. LaCie seem to use a mix of different third party drives, most of which seem to be Seagate.

[seanessy]

Re: DRM
Does this WD drive have DRM restrictions on what types of files can be streamed or shared on a local network, just as the other MyBook drives?
http://blog.wired.co...rn-digital.html
If so, it deserves a zero mouse rating, IMHO

[sandbag1]

If you have a PPC Mac, you should know THIS about WD My Book hard drives.

[alvarorb]

These drives have a serious problem
I had one of these drives. I got it for my PowerMac G5 (Dual 2.0). From day one the drive had a serious problem. After the drive spon down as part of it's sleep mode, it stopped responding. That would freeze the finder. The only solution: Restart.
I tried formating the drive. Connecting it via USB, FireWire, eSata. Same problem. After two weeks of writing to WD tech support and posting on their forums and Apple forums with no answers. I called Western Digital Tech Support and I was told that this was a "known" issue. So I sent the drive back.
Now I'm using a Segate FreeAgent drive. Yes, it's not 1GB, only 750GB. But that will do for now.
Then I did a little digging on our HD cemetery at the office. And found that many of the dead drives over the years were WD. Never a problem with Seagate.
I don't plan to buy WD again. What got me was their unresponsiveness on their online helpdesk and forum.
Alvaro