WD My Book Studio/GreenPower Drives Issues

[gr8bob]

I've just got myself the 1TB single drive edition of the WD My Book Studio and I was surprised how bad WD had skimped on the build quality of it. Aesthetics aside, I'm more worried with the drive running inside it.

As many reviews had shown that the drive in it is a GreenPower drive which WD claims to be "more power efficient, quieter, and cooler". This is where it troubles me. Since I haven't used a single desktop drive for more than a few years (been living on laptops ever since college), and I'm working in a really quiet environment (so quiet until you can hear the hum from your desk lamp), I might be a bit paranoid, but bear with me..

From my perception, the idling drive is a bit noisier and the seek noise is much more obvious (clicking) than the standard notebook hard disk. And it seems to have quite some vibration/hum to go along with all those noise.. :X

What's more ridiculous is that when I'm performing the Quick Test in WD Diagnostics for Windows, it clicks, clanks and vibrate like hell during the 5 minute of quick test. I'm not prepared to send it back yet because it's already filled up with all my files that I have no place to put at the moment.

So any users of those drives do please help me shine some light on this issue.

P/S: Still haven't performed the firmware update for the drives yet because MBP's stuck with the AppleCare guys.. currently running it off a Wintel notebook via USB2.0

 

[hexonxonx]

Three weeks ago today, I purchased a Mac Pro. The same day, I went and bought two 1TB WD green drives to place in it.

They are of course internal drives. They are the quietest drives I have ever owned. I never hear the disk access and I never hear the drive spinning up or down. Seriously, they are the quietest drives I have owned.

Not sure what your problem could be with your drive. If you can, you may think about exchanging it and see if you get a better one.

 

[sickmacdoc]

<clip>
From my perception, the idling drive is a bit noisier and the seek noise is much more obvious (clicking) than the standard notebook hard disk. And it seems to have quite some vibration/hum to go along with all those noise.. :X

What's more ridiculous is that when I'm performing the Quick Test in WD Diagnostics for Windows, it clicks, clanks and vibrate like hell during the 5 minute of quick test. I'm not prepared to send it back yet because it's already filled up with all my files that I have no place to put at the moment.<clip>

On the offchance that there actually IS a hardware problem with the drive (since the other poster noted the quiet nature of his), I would think that the first order of business would be for you to obtain sufficient space (on a new drive, online, space on other existing drives or whatever) to backup your data from that drive.

If there is a hardware problem and it fails suddenly, that seems like quite a bit of data to lose- but only you can determine if that would be a problem for you of course! I know it would be for me since I have almost 3Tb of design files I would not be able to replace so I back them up to two sets of backup disks!

 

[gr8bob]

I've arranged a replacement drive with the retailer. It's going to be trouble to backup all that data considering that my 320GB WD Scorpio drive in my MBP is giving off SMART error out of a sudden. WTF is wrong with WD??!?

For anyone that wants to know how LOUD the drive is, I've attached a link to the video clip.

Click here for YouTube link

P/S: The quick test begins after the Windows 'ding' sound..