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Will a WD Black Dual Drive work in a Mac Yet?

Assuming you have an older Macbook Pro, yes, of course it will work. It's just a standard 2.5" SATA drive.

P.S. Macs are PCs too.
 
Wicked1 said:
wondering if anyone has tried, but I think WD states PC Only for now, just checking because I am in need of a new drive soon.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236642
Click to expand...

There is no such thing as a "Mac" hard drive. It's nothing more than a marketing scheme to get you to pay more for the exact same item.

So long as it has the proper SATA port and physically fits in the computer, it's compatible. A Mac is just a PC in a pretty case running OS X.
 
This drive requires special setup to get it running, and as far as I know that can only be done under Windows.

The drivers WD provides are Windows only but there is a way, at least in theory, to use the drive in OS X. You need Windows access for this and what you do is set up the partitions in Windows and then use OS X's Disk Utility to format the partitions from NTFS to HFS.

Unfortunately I don't have a Mac with USB 3.0 port to thoroughly test the Black2 in OS X, so this is merely a heads up that it may work. I was able to read and write to the drive normally but without a faster interface I can't test that the writes are indeed going to the SSD when they should be. In theory yes, but it's possible that the drivers include more than just an automated partition set up.
Click to expand...

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7682/the-wd-black2-review/2


Basically I would be very cautious unless you can find a guide showing someone actually using this as the main drive in their Mac.


freeskier93 said:
Assuming you have an older Macbook Pro, yes, of course it will work. It's just a standard 2.5" SATA drive.

P.S. Macs are PCs too.
Click to expand...

snaky69 said:
There is no such thing as a "Mac" hard drive. It's nothing more than a marketing scheme to get you to pay more for the exact same item.

So long as it has the proper SATA port and physically fits in the computer, it's compatible. A Mac is just a PC in a pretty case running OS X.
Click to expand...

This is not just a standard SATA drive. It contains both an SSD and a standard hard drive, which require special drivers to set up and activate since they are being multiplexed over a single SATA connection. The Anandtech review above has a lot of interesting information about how this works.
 
Thanks, after reading I am not going to buy the drive, have no real evidence this will work in a MacBook Pro, so just going to get the Seagate Hybrid 1TB Drive instead. I still can not believe WD has not made a Mac version to compete with Seagate? I guess that is why I only own Seagate Drives, situations like this where I want a WD drive but they do not support what I run, oh well but thanks a bunch for the info, I am not going to be a Guinea Pig for WD.
 
Wicked1 said:
I still can not believe WD has not made a Mac version to compete with Seagate?
Click to expand...



Someone wrote an article on how to format the drive to work with OS X (and it would work after being formatted in Windows), but it was a real pain because you had to know precisely where the SSD stopped and where the HD began. Frankly, with the fact that for the price you can get a half terabyte SSD these days, I can't see any reason to buy it.
 
Wicked1 said:
wondering if anyone has tried, but I think WD states PC Only for now, just checking because I am in need of a new drive soon.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236642
Click to expand...

There is away for that. But you need a PC windows computer.

Connect the WD Black Dual Drive to a PC direct to the main board (SATA connector from the MB NO USB caddy). the computer will detect 1 of the 2 hd. using the usb drive, install it, and activate the partition. both partitions, formatted in fat32. disconnect. install it on the mac, and using disk utility from a usb bootable check if both drives are there. install a clean os on the SSD, and format the 1 t drive in journaled.

that should work.

The idea is to activate the drive. There are some rumors that WD is going to replace that soon, since the perforamce vs price are bad. Is sad that i can not get one for testing. but i stick with my mx100(512) and my 3gbxs 1tb hd on my caddy.

I read these from a china website, but i do not have the link. sorry. if you can get a test drive and perform these please do. if not, for the price of that, you can get a perfect SSD.
 
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