Is WD Scorpio Black Incompatible With Late 2008 MBP?

[PeteJames]

Read this review on amazon and it put me off. Is there any truth to it?

"Great drive, BUT incompatible with Lion and a Late 2008 MacBook Pro
Sadly caused massive issues with my system such as freezing and kernel panics. Don't buy it. I spoke to WD tech support hq in the states and they said there was a fundamental firmware incompatibility.
Something to do with how these WD drives handle the data on the platters. "

Thanks

 

[miles01110]

I have that drive in mine and it works fine.

 

[PeteJames]

I have that drive in mine and it works fine.

Really? Anyone else?
Thanks

 

[Astroboy907]

Really? Anyone else?
Thanks

It should work fine. Thing is though, scorpio blacks run off of SATA III, and your mac is sata II. So if the drive exceeded sata III speeds it would slow down so your mac could handle it. Should not be a problem though...

 

[bozz2006]

No worries. My guess is that person had a small issue that they didn't know how to reconcile, so they jumped to the extreme. Buy that drive with no reservations.

 

[pragmatous]

HDD have just now barely exceeded sata 1 speeds. Sata 2 for HDD is plenty still. You shouldn't have a problem at all.

 

[PeteJames]

Thanks for your comments. It arrived today and seems to be working fine. Seems like the amazon reviewer didn't know what he was doing.

I am concerned about the noise though. It sounds like a constant fan. I can't remember quite how loud my other drives have been but i'm thinking of sending this one back as its annoying me. I'll test the 3 internals i've got laying about tomorrow and see what the difference is. Maybe because its new i'm more tuned into it and conscious of it thus perceiving greater noise. I really would like an SSD but would need a 512GB which is pretty steep indeed in terms of cost!

One odd think i noticed - may be to do the fan type noise gets much quieter if i press down 2 fingers on the top casing of my mbp over where the hard drive is




What is the quietest high capacity HDD i can get?

I found this article and they seemed to think the hitachi but then its 5400 speed so not the fairest of comparisons.

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article29-page2.html

If truth be told are all HDDs really pretty noisy and there isn't much difference between them? Certainly the data in the all test seems to be close.

 

[John Mtc]

MBP Mid 2009 w/WD Scorpio Black 750GB - Spinning Wheel

Really? Anyone else?
Thanks

I have a MBP with OSX Lion 10.7.4, 4gig RAM and 2.53 GHz Core 2 Duo

The laptop worked flawless with the OEM drive (250gig) with Safari, iMovie, et. all. After upgrading to the WD Scorpio Black (WD7500BPKT), the spinning beach ball is a common occurrence whenever I have a lot of disk i/o.

I can't speak for any other MBP models as they have different SATA controllers, etc. But this specific MBP with the NVidia MCP79 controller (which supports SATA 3.0) has an issue with the Scorpio. I've tried each of the suggested workarounds (SATA 1.5), turning off SMS, resetting the PRAM, etc. and nothing will solve the issue. Per Level 2 tech support at Western Digital, there is a firmware incompatibility which is the root cause. Now, this may or may not be true. But I have yet to find anyone with the same laptop and a Scorpio Black who isn't experiencing the spinning wheel from hell.

If anyone has a tested workaround, fix, et. all, please advise, and you'll save me the cost of tossing the drive for an SSD.

Thanks!

John

p.s. I do have the following "third-party" apps: Air Display, iAntivirus, VMWare Fusion, Boom, Verizon Wireless and WD Smartware.

 

[PeteJames]

Please could you give me more details on this 'spinning wheel from hell' situation. What exactly is happening? When did it start happening? Does it happen all of the time or only sometimes? I only installed the drive yesterday but haven't encountered any issues so far. What kind of disc i/o are we talking about?