Western Digital External Drive Issues with Early 2008 Mac Pro

[law guy]

Hello All -

I've got two WD 500 GB My Book Pro drives and a 1 TB My Book Studio Edition Drive.

The issues that I'm having are that when they're all on the FW 800 bus, they'll all mount initially, but one might disappear after a day or two and then I have to restart (unplug) the drive to get it to mount again. So I put one on the FW 400 bus and left the other two on the 800 - same issue - one may disappear from time-to-time.

Also - when they're plugged in, more often than not the machine will stall out trying to either start-up or shut down. When I disconnect the drives, the machine then proceeds to either start-up or shut down.

Have folks experienced similar issues? Are there some set of Mac OS 10.5 drivers that I should be aware of?

The drives are all formatted for the Apple journaled format.

Thanks for sharing any solutions that you may have come across.

 

[thetoness]

Update the firmware

Go to the WD support site and update the firmware, this should help you. I had the same problem with the 800 FW and the update fixed it. Hope this helps.

 

[law guy]

Go to the WD support site and update the firmware, this should help you. I had the same problem with the 800 FW and the update fixed it. Hope this helps.

Thanks. These drives are all so new I didn't expect all of that firmware upgrade material out there. I went to the WD site and found upgrades for all three.

The drives mount MUCH more quickly, and start-up works just fine. I haven't tried shut-down yet.

A few notes for folks - the My Book Pros must be upgraded connected via USB. The Studio edition must be upgraded connected by firewire.
Only one drive can be updated at a time.

I hope this thread helps others.

 

[phudson]

Go to the WD support site and update the firmware, this should help you. I had the same problem with the 800 FW and the update fixed it. Hope this helps.

Any suggestions where - I cannot find the upgrade on the site -thanks