By the way even if you open up the drive, you still should have tried to get WD to replace it. Just explain how and why you did it. Unless there's sign of physical damage like the drive being dropped, I would bet they can still be talked into RMA'ing it for you, but I thinks it's way too late now.
Hey MacRobert:
I have one of those drives too. Ended up using Scannerz on it too. Why? The stupid I/O cable that came with the system went bad after a few months. That might be excusable if I'd been plugging and unplugging things constantly, but I'm not. I had to replace it. I don't have the weird timeout or sleeps you do though. All in all I'd say the quality of the product is not impressive. On the box it looks like the unit is in a black machined metal case, when you open it up it's just a plastic box and a cheap flimsy one at that. The original cable was as cheap as possible.
I've heard that the newer units have some type of proprietary controller on them that encrypts stuff on the fly and if you take it out of the WD case and try and used it in another unit, like a regular hard drive, it won't work at all. I have no reason to disbelieve that story but I don't know which specific models they're doing it to either.
A local company had a number of 2TB USB 2.0 WD external My Book external HDs on sale for $79.95, so I bought one because the price was too temping. I thought I'd repartition the drive so I could haVe a part for Snow Leopard, one for ML, and then a few more for TM backups off my main system. I use SL once in a while for some older PPC graphics apps.
In any case, after I put both SL and ML onto the thing I decided to boot off of it. I wasn't expecting Ferrari like performance but I wasn't expecting errors, either. What happens seems to be that the drive just plain locks up once in a while. You'll be in the middle of something and it will just freeze.
I thought the drive was bad so I got out my copy of Scannerz and ran a scan on it. The drive ****looks**** like it's passing with one strange caveat: Randomly, Scannerz picks up a long irregularity, and it's ALWAYS, not sometimes, ALWAYS 30.5 sec +/- 0.15 seconds. I couldn't make sense of the problem. I contacted SCSC (who makes Scannerz) and they had me send them the log file for the test. They said they're going to try and get a unit like mine to replicate the problem, but indicated that it looked to them like the drive was either falling asleep or parking its heads....right in the middle of use.
Has anyone else ever had this problem? I did a little research and this external unit and it's using a some type of variable spindle speed Western Digital "Green" drive. This is a Western Digital My Book for Mac, USB 2.0 unit 2.0TB Units.
As-is, the unit is almost useless to me. The sole purpose wasn't to just do back ups, it was also to be used to host a clone of both my SL and ML partitions, and allow me to eventually pull the SL partition off my internal HD all together.
And low and behold...I bought it 35 days ago so I can't return it.
It's still working. Aside from the timeout it likes to inject every now and then, it seems rock solid. I still don't trust it though.I'm curious. What happened to the WD drive that was giving you problems? Did it die or is it still working?
At least you got something out of it.I use it as a secondary (as in not important) backup and to test new OSes. Being aware of the problem helped, otherwise you'd think there was something wrong with the OS or system. Disappointing but tolerable I guess.
I suppose. But for the same money i could have gotten something that works. Moral of the story: If you think there's something wrong with something, return it, don't try to troubleshoot it thinking it's some easy fix.At least you got something out of it.
I use it as a secondary (as in not important) backup and to test new OSes. Being aware of the problem helped, otherwise you'd think there was something wrong with the OS or system. Disappointing but tolerable I guess.
Was this one of their drive's that's encrypted by the controller? They had or have some weird setup where the combo case interface to the outside world and the controller on the drive were encrypting the drive making it virtually useless outside of its USB housing. Just wondered if maybe that wasn't causing the delay.