WD Caviar Green 2TB - disappearing drive

Hi all,
I have installed a 2TB WD drive for use as a time machine drive. (expanding from 1TB external)
Sometimes the disk displays odd characteristics, such as:
• Overnight (last night for example) TM didn't do any further backups after 7.43pm. This caused system preferences to crash and of course TM wasn't accessible. And Finder also hung. So I restarted...
• But because of whatever reason the computer wouldn't restart, so now I had to do a hard restart, but the WD drive wouldn't show up.
• I shut down, remove the drive from its bay (bay 2), put it back in, restart and all is well again.
*Now, is this a low power/sleep issue?* It would seem that the hard restart would remove that question.
*Is it a jumper settings issue?* Removing the drive and putting it back in would seem to eliminate that issue. (for the record, they are at OPT1 enabled, as that seemed to work best at the time.)
Does anyone know what the best way forward is? It would seem to me that neither the drive or the Mac are broken (there was a 500gb WD in that bay before with no problems) and when the drive is mounted - it seems to work fine, until I'm not around then there is a problem.
I would prefer to allow my drives to sleep when unused, but is switching that preference off the only option?
Thanks,
Aaron

Why or what jumper setting is that for? default as is with none.
Removing and installing again isn't going to change anything.
It comes with SSC and OPT1 Disabled. Leave it that way.
And I would not allow drives to spin down.
I am also not a big fan if at all of TimeMachine (think after 3 yrs but no) so I favor SuperDuper, CCC and Tri-Backup 5.
Is it a jumper settings issue? Removing the drive and putting it back in would seem to eliminate that issue. (for the record, they are at OPT1 enabled, as that seemed to work best at the time.)
10.5.6 and above should be fine. Even with the newest version (with 64MB cache).
Western Digital 2 TB Caviar Green SATA Intellipower 64 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive WD20EARS
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=773
http://support.wdc.com/product/kb.asp?groupid=608
What I do with any new WD drive is run it through WD Lifeguard (in Windows 7) and do full extended test, full format with zero.
http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=608
There have been issues with 2TB drives in Mac Pro 1,1 (often as last in bay #4 it seemed).
How about mounting in external FW400?

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Seagate 2TB Caviar Green 5900RPM drives.

This is more of an informational topic than a question, but: Over the last two weeks, I've acquired four of these drives. The first two were on sale for $80, but I paid the full $99 for the last two. I've been using three of them in a software raid(Linux MD raid on Debian Testing) for a backup server, and the fourth for an offline backup of some stuff I wanted a spare copy of. Anyway, I have to say I'm very impressed with these drives. I've been getting somewhere over 120MB/sec linear read(Note: was tested on my slow server, so it could be even faster) and around 130MB/sec linear *write* over the entire drive. I was surprised at how /little/ the speed dropped off near the end of the drive, but that could be just good firmware. From what I've seen so far, I recommend them to anyone building a backup or media server. Anyway, has anyone else had any experience with these? I'd assume they wouldn't be super great for a boot drive due to the lower RPM, but I've never tried - they might be perfectly great due to their high density per platter.

TheLexMachine wrote:
WD drive speeds go up and down as needed with the Green drives.
Nope: http://www.maximumpc.com/article/reviews/western_digital_caviar_green_2tb
Also, while I can't point to any proof, I know that someone did an audio-analysis on the /1/TB Caviar Greens, and it turns out that the speed appeared to be, in fact, 5400RPM(though WD wouldn't publically admit to it).
TheLexMachine wrote:
They have 5400 RPM drives but those are the Blue drives and not the Green ones.
If you had looked at WD's own product spec sheet, you'd know that this was wrong. Both the Blue and Black drives are 7200RPM; the blue's are just cheaper and not *quite* as fast(according to various benchmarks I've seen)
TheLexMachine wrote:
As for the Barracuda LP drives, they seem to have a significant failure rate or at least they did last time I checked as the line is prone to defects and design flaws, which is why people generally shun them in favor of the WD Green drives.
I saw that -- to some extent, anyway -- when I was on Newegg, and I intended to get WD Caviar Greens 1.5TB's. Unfortunately, BBY's deal on them was web-only, so I got what was available in-store; in this case, 2TB Barracuda Green's. So far, I've been extremely impressed by the performance level, and I've got some redundancy so I'm not *too* worried about failures(And I've been working towards getting all three disks in my raid to have been from different lots so they don't fail all at once), but we'll just have to see in the months ahead.
Entropy wrote:
I don't know about the new "green" Barracudas but I generally rely on the non-"green" Barracudas.
The last time I tried switching to WD (earlier this year with a 1TB unit) was a nightmare. The disk's onboard controller would randomly freeze up and drop its SATA link. Attempting to retrieve SMART status from Linux would cause the drive to instantly hang.
That's interesting: I've had about 6 of the 640GB Caviar Blue's; absolutely no issues on Linux or Windows. You could have had slightly-bad drive, just with some part of the controller failing.

MSI K7N2Delta Platinum/ILSR + 2TB WD Caviar GREEN

Hi!
What is the difference between this two old motherboards? Do anyone would work recognize a 2TB Caviar Green drive? I need to add this disk to an old socket A machine to be used as storage/backup.
THanks in advance!

i would doubt that any socket A machine is capable of using a 2TB hard drive at full capacity as they where never even on the horizon when made by a long time because the socket A boards are now ancient!
i don't even think 1TB drives where around then as your board was built in the time of windows 2000! if i remeber correctly the max capacity at that time was around 100-250GB at most!
i may be wrong but i believe it cant be done (could be wrong but its a long shot)!
id suggest scrapping it and buying a low end modern motherboard+cheap ram and a cheap cpu for $150 as a backup and storage device as i dont think a socket A board can even do it!

WD Caviar Green drives - Only good for certain uses!

I originally set up my Mac Pro as follows:
Bay 1 - Original 640GB Drive - MacOSX
Bay 2 - 1.5TB Caviar Green - RAID 1 striped with Bay 3
Bay 3 - 1.5TB Caviar Green - RAID 1 striped with Bay 2
Bay 4 - 2.0TB Caviar Green - Time Machine Backup
The RAID 1 array was mounted as the /User directory.
From the start there were annoying lags on a semi-regular basis. Even with only a few things open, like 1 instance each of Dreamweaver, Safari, and iTunes, I would get the spinning beach-ball of death for a few seconds every 30-45 seconds, and sometimes for as long as 10-20 seconds. Occasionally iTunes would actually cut out as it tried to play music.
Whenever these problems got bad I checked the Activity Monitor, did a 'top' in the terminal, even ran diagnostics a few times. No problems were ever obvious. Tons of available CPU time, tons of available RAM, no disk problems. Still, the system ran like a 386 with 640kb of RAM, not a 3.0Ghz Quad-core Nehalem with 12GB of RAM!
I started suspecting the disks as the culprit and looked into the Caviar Green drives a little further...
Western Digital lists the spindle speed as "Variable 5400-7200 RPM'. In fact, each drive is tested to determine the speed with the best performance/economy balance, and that speed is locked into the drive. This means that two otherwise identical Caviar Green drives can have two widely different spindle speeds. Put those two into a striped RAID array, and you get the problems I had.
Before reporting a bad computer to AppleCare I decided to confirm the drive theory by replacing the two Caviar Green drives in the RAID array with Caviar Black drives. Right now I have 4 instances of Safari, 2 Terminals, 2 Finder windows, Dreamweaver, Remote Desktop, Photoshop and iTunes running, and have seen zero glitches so far. The system is finally running like it should! The Caviar Green drive I have in bay 4 as my Time Machine backup is fine - this is actually a good application for these quieter, lower power drives. Just don't put them into a RAID array where you expect reasonable performance!
The two Green drives are going back to NewEgg tomorrow (minus a restocking fee because I am past the 30-day return window).
P.S., The Caviar Black drives are just fine for a software-based RAID 0 or RAID 1 array like this. WD makes the more expensive RE3 drives for RAID arrays, but the only difference is the amount of time the drive is allowed to take for error recovery. The Black drive could be down long enough to be dropped from an array (10 seconds or more), but the RE3 always comes back within 7 seconds after error recovery to prevent this. So you only benefit from the RE3 drives if you are running with a hardware RAID card, like you'd need for RAID 5.

Sorry, typo...
Table should say RAID 0, not RAID 1:
Bay 1 - Original 640GB Drive - MacOSX
Bay 2 - 1.5TB Caviar Green - *RAID 0* striped with Bay 3
Bay 3 - 1.5TB Caviar Green - *RAID 0* striped with Bay 2
Bay 4 - 2.0TB Caviar Green - Time Machine Backup
The *RAID 0* array was mounted as the /User directory.

Big problem with new WD Caviar Green HDD, please advise!

I bought a new Western Digital Caviar Green HDD 1TB, ( WD10EADS ) it is a SATA 3Gb/s interface HDD, 3.5-inch form factor. the RPM = IntelliPower (NOT 7200 RPM or 5400 RPM which means Rotate automatically depends on the needs of fetching data I suppose?)
I acknowledged that this series of HDD which three of 6 have the same Power Management which Read/Write = 4.9W / Idle = 2.8W / Standby = 0.4 W / Sleep = 0.4W
They are differ from the other 3, which 500GB one is 4.1W / 2.2W / 0.8W / 0.8W and 1.5TB is 4.73W 2.75W / 0.72W / 0.72W; 2TB is 6W 3.7W 0.8W 0.8W
Which mean the Standby and Sleep mode are the same state.
Now my big problem is, I bought an external dock SI-7908UI for this WD Caviar Green HDD.
( http://www.ssi.com.tw/product_content.aspx?id=92 )
So I first put the HDD into the SI-7908UI Dock ( USB 2.0 / eSATA / Firewire 400 /800 )
I tried many way of sequence of who power on first? WD Caviar Power on first? or Mac mini Power on first? I found that the best way is Mac mini Power on first, then Power on the external HDD.
OK, before I address my big problem, I should let you know, I found that there is NO S.M.A.R.T. working when you put a S.M.A.R.T. HDD outside the Mac or PC. In Dock, the S.M.A.R.T. won't work, That's how I saw in System Profiler, the FireWire tab says " S.M.A.R.T. status: Not Supported "
and I did test a Non-Green Maxtor HDD, the S.M.A.R.T. doesn't show either. You'll need this info before the real problem I'm gonna say in the following.
NOW, about 10~15 minutes after my Mac mini boot, if I didn't fetch anything from my external HDD, it would goes to sleep itself, that confirmed that the Specification Sheet was true, the Idle = 2.8W and I believe it goes to Idle, NOT Standby or Sleep, which I also believe the Standby or Sleep signal is supposed to be given by Mac OS, but it sounds like Standby or Sleep, BECAUSE the WD HDD suddenly not rotate and the sound it appears that it goes to SLEEP, am I right? I keep Mac awake by browsing the web so Mac mini won't go to sleep (I set 10 minutes in Energy Saver and I checked Put the HDD to sleep when possible)
Well, That is my big problem when WD Green HDD goes to sleep, because I CAN'T wake it up, NOT eject or Shut down the Mac mini. (OK, I'm NOT sure if it goes to Sleep or Idle)
First I thought it freezes the whole Mac OS, then I found I still can move many things, such as I am doing right now, post this big problem here. but I am sure the others are freeze! and no matter how many time I click Shut Down or Restart or Force Quit, the Mac mini didn't respond.
I tried to figure it out because I don't want to Shut Down by force.(5 seconds Press the Power button)
then I found that if I power down the external dock 7908-UI when Mac fail to shut down/restart/or eject the external HDD, It worked.
And the Mac OS will appear a window says that "I shouldn't unplug an external device without Ejecting it first" something like that. and suddenly it shuts down very quickly, everything back to normal, it shut down successfully.
What am I gonna do with this? Am I going to power down my external HDD first every time I want to shut down/eject/restart? Because the Eject the external HDD will cause freeze too! Freeze Finder I suppose.
Is it caused by 7908-UI ? or Caused by WD Caviar's Green Power management?
Because I don't trust 7908-UI, it doesn't look like a trusted brand, I've never heard of this SSI company anyway.
What am I gonna do? Please advise.
Thanks in advance.

Please realise that I am not the right person to be asking. I pointed you to a thread where, as a Moderator at the Bombich forums, I felt the need to warn users of CCC that a WD drive might cause problems. The thread mainly just copies what WD have said.
Obviously your drive will respond/awake/spin up when you access it manually. Some of the problems are...
•  Most users want to be in control of whether and/or when a drive sleeps -- WD's auto-sleep cannot be disabled and so precludes that.
•  Most users want their drive to obey settings in Energy Saver -- the WD auto-sleep mechanism doesn't allow that.
•  Most users want a scheduled cloning/backup to take place during the night. The cloning app starting the backup process should cause the target drive, if sleeping, to wake/spin up so that the process can take place -- it does for all drives except WD drives where the auto-sleep mechanism used doesn't allow it. LaCie drives, for instance, have auto-sleep +as an option+, during which the drive will respond to Energy Saver settings and to software such as a cloning app.
Please, Mauricette, put you questions/concerns/problems to the reseller or to WD, both of whom took your money without warning you. I am NOT a WD expert! ...or lover! ( ) I became more than disenchanted when I saw that a) WD do not point out the limitations of their external drives at point of sale, and b) WD put the blame for these inadequacies/problems/limitations onto Apple, ignoring the fact that no drives other than WD drives have them.
Andreas

3tb wd caviar green

hi i have a mac pro 8 core 2008 and i am just wanting to know can you upgrade the mac pro to the 3tb wd caviar green with the SATA 6 Gb/s or can you only use what apple say and thats the 3 GB/s
many thanks
BAZz

Never buy a drive from Apple unless you use the Apple Pro RAID card. Maybe. Which does not support 3TB.
Green are best not used for performance or system but fine for backups. Not everyone is totally happy though but some are in using them for data drives (frequent parking and spin down to go green).
No reason to use old tech. You want the 64MB cache 6G edition.
Apple charges way more than say Newegg or Amazon.
WD Black is your best for performance drive which $124 for 1TB @ 'Egg and very nice. Don't think they have more than 2TB in Black though as yet.

Best 2TB hard drive for FCP???

I'm upconverting dozens of mini-DV tapes of old WWII footage and will need at least 2TB of storage.
What is the best, most reliable mac pro desktop internal hard drive I can get for storing video and editing with FCP7? Or should I get one of those external cases where you can house multiple drives?
I was initially thinking of going with Western Digital's Caviar Black 2TB or perhaps Seagate's 2TB Barracuda, but I noticed on Apple store a 2TB with 3GB/s serial ATA. But much more expensive of course ($549).
Thanks in advance for any advice,
- Nick

I think you will need a fast firewire drive for an external hard drive.
You may look at istoragepro dock 2TB, they offer impressive speed and high capacity: http://www.macworld.com/reviews/product/412562/review/istorageproit1_dock2tb.html
here is the spec: http://www.istoragepro.com/prod.php?id=it1dock

Caviar Green compatible with MacBook Pro 13.3"

Is the WD Caviar Green 1 TB compatible with the MacBook Pro 13.3"?

Hopefully you mean in an external enclosure. It certainly _will not_ fit inside the MBP (it's a drive for desktop computers). Even externally, not really. It requires a SATA connection, and there's not one on the 13" MBP, nor is there an expansion slot to add one. You could (in theory) get a SATA to USB adapter, but that would defeat the purpose of an eSATA drive...
WD did recently announce 750 GB and 1 TB laptop drives:
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=685
The 1 TB model isn't shipping quite yet. Also, those drives are too tall to fit in a 13" MBP (they will fit in a 17" MBP). The maximum sized internal drive for a 13" MBP is currently 500 GB.

Hi, I have an early 2008 24" iMac, I need more storage space and was wondering if I could fit a 3TB Western Digital Caviar Green HDD into it with out any problems? This is the one I've seen, Western Digital Caviar 3TB SATA 6 GB/s 64MB Cache 3.5 inch

Hi, I have an early 2008 24" iMac, I need more storage space and was wondering if I could fit a 3TB Western Digital Caviar Green HDD into it with out any problems? This is the one I've seen, Western Digital Caviar 3TB SATA 6 GB/s 64MB Cache 3.5 inch

My bad?
You're original response was questions/post about an iMac. Now you've edited it to ask about a Mac Pro?
You can more easily add internal drives in a Mac Pro.
Not too terribly easy to add/replace drives in an iMac.
If younhave questions about a Mac Pro, try posting in the Mac Pro forums.
Much more knowledgeable users there.

ITunes saying - The song "XYZ" could not be used because the original file could not be found. Would you like to locate it? I have my songs all located on a 2TB hard drive and it still says it has 150GB on it but can't find them and they are there???

Help!
Opened iTunes to play some music on the computer tonight and its coming up that the songs cannot be located for virtually all of my iTunes library??? I store my iTunes library on a 2TB hard drive and its always worked fine but I ran iBoostup software earlier today and its hasn't worked since then although I have to admit I haven't tried it for a week. It was a free app to clean up files on the apps store.
When I click on the 2TB hard drive under the iTunes link it still comes up 150GB is in the file but it just can't find the songs???
Can anyone help?
Cheers!

The links below illustrate how your iTunes should look if you use default settings in preferences. If you don't use those settings then you have to know what you're doing.
Image of folder structure and explanation of different iTunes versions (turingtest2 post) - https://discussions.apple.com/message/13025536 and https://discussions.apple.com/message/17457605
The above links also illustrate the Media folder and its subfolders. Look for a file in there in the logical structure by folder artist and album. If you're lucky, linking one file will get an offer to link others and it iwll all come together again.
I see you are running OSX 10.5.8 it would help to know which version of iTunes you use now and which one you used before.

I recently moved and had to disconnect my WD My Pro Edition II 2TB external drive I had been using for backup. Its been several months and now when i try to reconnect the external dire (Use a firewire cable) it does not recognize the drive is there. I a

I recently moved and had to disconnect my WD My Pro Edition II 2TB external drive I had been using for backup.
Its been several months (many upgrades to the iMac software during this time), and now when I try to reconnect the external dire (Use a firewire cable) it does not recognize the drive is there. I also tried "reloading" software from the Western Digital site, but after following all the instructions, it looks like my iMac doesn't support this software (I can't even locate it after I follow all the instructions.
Thnaks, for anyones ideas on how I can get this working again.....

First of all, you do not really want to use their software; if you want a bootable clone, use either Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper. If you simply want to drag and drop some files, you don't need software to do that. The important thing on any external drive is that you format/partition it correctly (Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and using GUID partition scheme).
Unfortunately, I don't know anything about WD drives or their software, so I don't have any idea what kind of backup you did. Having said that, it should still recognize the external even if it's outdated. Have you tried mounting it manually in Disk Utility? If you can get it to mount, you could (worst case scenario) just drag your stuff off onto your internal and then reformat the external.

My WD 2TB External Drive can't be formatted.

Hi there,
Something really mysterious happened last night and it has completely stumped me.
I have a WD 2TB External Drive that I use with my iMac and Macbook Pro, it's formatted FAT so that I can use it on Windows aswell. This setup has worked well until last night. I plugged the external into a Win PC and it didn't want to pick up. It showed the drive letter and drive but not the usual name. It gave it the generic windows name and when I clicked on the icon nothing happens. When I ran disk management on Win it shows the drive is healthy but that it has 2TB free space which is obviously not true since it had 1TB free space.
I decided to safely remove it and plugged it into my macbook pro. It then also didn't pick up and only showed up in Disk Utility with the partion grey'd out. I tried for a couple of hours to verify the disk and repair the disk in Disk Utility and it would run and complete both but then when I tried to mount it in Disk Utlity it would say it can't.
I then thought the drive is fried so I downloaded Drive Drill to see if I could access the content on it to restore my lost data. I ran it and it picked up the drive and restored 100% of my lost information. I then tried to format the drive but everytime I delete the partition and format it it gets stuck on a certain position and won't do anything for hours.
I know the drive works fine because initially I left it and it eventually formatted the drive and it picked up on the dock. I then tried to copy information over to it and after 100GB it got stuck and wouldn't do a thing. I then decided to format again because I suspected some files that were corrupt might have been transferred over again when restoring the data on it.
Now my problem is that it shows up in Disk Utility and I can run verify and recovery but as soon as I want to format it doesn't work and it stays stuck at the point of formatting the drive.
I have already tried the following:
- A different USB plug
- Formatting in Windows
- Different Formats (ex-FAT, NTFS etc)
- Completely removing the partition and creating a new one
Here are screen shots of what it says when I verify and recover the drive:

Thanks for the feedback Linc,
I have tried to repartition it and I also tried to delete and format, all of it takes time and finishes the process but then when I tried to mount it says it can't mount the drive and neither does it pick up on Windows. Very confused!

I have a Mac PC and bought a 2Tb hard drive to use by both my HP PC and my Apple PC by putting on my wifi network but I do not know how to do it? I thought I did but was very wrong.

I have a Macbook Pro laptop running MAC OS X 10.6.8, an WD external 2Tb hard drive, and an HP Laptop running Windows 7. I want to use the hard drive on my wi-fi network so that I can use the same file on either laptop? I thought I knew how to configure this but I was very wrong. Help?

VLB3,
what ports are on the WD external disk?

Can I use a 2tb external drive with Time Machine to backup my Mac Mini (256gbSSD + 2tbHDD)?

Can I use a 2tb external drive with Time Machine to backup what I have on my Mac Mini?
My Mac Mini has one 256 SSD and one 2tb HDD. I want to use Time Machine to do a backup of everything.
Would an external 2tb My Passport Drive by Western Digital work for the backup?
It seems like it would not work because the total storage on the Mac Mini is 2304 gigabytes (SSD + HDD).
And the external Western Digital drive is only 2048 in gigabytes versus 2304 gigabytes the Mac Mini has.

No. A Time Machine backup drive should have at least twice the capacity of the drive it backs up. You would need at least a 4 TB backup drive for Time Machine.
Might I suggest as an alternative that you not use Time Machine but a third-party backup utility that simply overwrites older files with new ones such that the backup drive can be the same capacity as the drive backed up.
Suggested Backup Software
1. Carbon Copy Cloner
2. Get Backup
3. Deja Vu
4. SuperDuper!
5. Synk Pro
6. Tri-Backup
Others may be found at MacUpdate.
Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on backup and restore. Also read How to Back Up and Restore Your Files.

How do I install windows xp on a 2TB external drive osx 10.6.8?

How do I -OR- CAN I
Install Windows XP on a 2TB external drive OSX 10.6.8?
I WILL get another 2TB to back up to 1st!
Should I start over with the New 2TB Drive and put the XP & OSX partitions on it 1st?
BTW... Anyone have an idea where I should send a WindowsXP drive that has the click of death syndrome to get the data off it?
Thanx Y'All
OKMatthew

Microsoft doesn't allow users to install Windows on an external drive, so you can't do it. Instead, install Windows in the internal hard drive through Boot Camp.
Respecting to your second problem, there are companies that recovers data from your hard drive, so you may want to contact with them

WD Caviar Green 2TB - disappearing drive

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