- speed: WD seems to want to hide the fact that this is a 5400 RPM drive while most other 3.5" drives these days run at 7200 RPM. Perhaps this is part of the reason for its low noise though...
Yes, it is--slower spinning equals less power equals less noise--and honestly for the average user 5400RPM at today's data density is perfectly acceptable. More importantly, if you've got it in a FW800 case, the speed difference between 5400RPM and 7200RPM is going to be minimal apart from slightly lower latency.
Note, also, that the slower it runs, the cooler it runs, and the longer it's likely to last.
- reliability: mentioned earlier in this thread, but is this more a case for this particular drive or something common to all hard drives of today (they don't make 'em like they used too)?
Actually, I think they make them much better than they used to. My sample size is admittedly small--only about 20 computers at work I manage, a half dozen of my own, and another half-dozen friends and family members--but I've seen a marked improvement in reliability over the last 20 years.
No, it's not going to last forever, but then nothing with moving parts will. They have a 3-year warranty, which tells you roughly how long WD thinks it's going to last. You can always go up to the similar-but-theoretically-more-reliable WD RE series drives if you want.
Personally, with my ~30-40 drive sample size I've seen less failures of WD drives than Maxtor or Hitachi/IBM, and I've had terrible luck with Seagate, but apart from Storage Review's old reliability database (or outliers like the old Deathstar series--had one die myself--or Seagate's undercooled externals that were notorious for killing drives) I think it's hard to draw conclusions.
I found the abovementioned article in XLR8yourMac
here, but didn't quite understand...
It is a set-once thing; you put it in something that can boot a DOS, use the WD utility to change the setting in the drive's firmware, and that's it--it should stick permanently from then on unless you change it again. You should, in theory, be able to set it to "off" then tell the Mac to sleep the drives when necessary to reduce noise and power use.
As I said, though, it didn't seem to resolve the behavior I was seeing. Given that I disabled the drive's internal sleep entirely, though, I'm wondering if my problem isn't actually something related to the enclosure rather than the drive itself. I no longer have a desktop with easily-accessible drive bays in which to test this, though I will note I've never had it "doze off" on me while using the Mini it's connected to directly--only via the network (it acts as a fileserver). I've also only tested it in this single case, so for all I know it's the case itself acting up.
At some point I'm probably going to do some experiments with either another brand of drive or another case, but I still like the drive, and it may work for you unless people who've used GP drives more directly, in a case connected to a MBP like you want to do, can say it doesn't.
