In what might be a new record for me, less than 24 hours have passed and I’m less than enamoured with the MyBook 1TB drive I bought. Documentaion describes these drives as having a feature that spins down the drives after some inactivity, but this seems not to be happening on the Mac. But that’s not the main problem — the problem is the noise!
The device has a cooling arrangement which seems to be comprised of a bunch of those incredibly annoying 1″ microfans (usually seen in low profile “pizza-box” style rackmount servers). The unit makes a heck of a noise while the cooling is running — I can hear it from two rooms away, even over my tinnitus. 😦
I had seen a bunch of comments about noise from the network version of the 1TB device, but I mistakenly thought that the non-network device would be cooled differently.
Sigh.
I think the real problem comes from Mac OS X not allowing the drives to become inactive. In Activity Monitor, there is a constant 3-4 disk writes per second which (if not activity caused by the monitor itself) might be keeping all the disks active.
Also, there’s something called “WDDrvSvc” that’s eating a few percent of CPU; I would think that’s just the service that keeps the pretty lights on the front up-to-date, but 3-5% of CPU is a bit much to pay… Kill it, and it gets restarted immediately… Sigh again…
I haven’t Googled anything about it yet, but if nothing turns up I can go back to my original plan of attaching the drive to the Slug and see if that doesn’t keep it busy. It’s also possible that running it in RAID-1 mode instead of RAID-0 keeps everything busy. I have verified that a single-drive MyBook does spin down when attached to the Slug.
Update: WD has a firmware update that changes the fan operation, but from the description in their knowledge-base of the changes it sounds like my unit already had the newest firmware. There are also some hacks around; folks have replaced what seems to be the poor-performing fan WD used as original equipment (I was wrong about them using 1″ microfans) with a larger, quieter fan with greater airflow. Others have flipped the fan around, because WD has the fan blowing air into the case from outside and it seems to be better swapping the fan to blow air out of the case. Some wisehats have even decided that the case has little airflow provision, and have taken to it with their Dremel tool…
Crossed Wires 