Western Digital My Book Pro Edition II
Thu, 2007.03.22 - 00:49 — müzso
Today DHL delivered my new Western Digital My Book Pro II external storage. 
My first impression was that this was made as a perfect companion for a MacBook Pro ... just take a look at it and say that it was not designed to look nice beside a Mac.
My second impression (after installing the driver and connecting to the Firewire port) that it's damned loud.
The fan turned on almost instantly and it was loud as hell. I went to the WD support site and looked for updates. There was no update for the driver, but there was a firmware update for the My Book. I uploaded the new firmware and after a restart of the My Book the fan did not spin up. Not instantly ... :-> I reconfigured the My Book to use RAID-1 (mirroring) instead of the default RAID-0 (striping), then started to move my stuff over to the My Book. The fan soon spinned up again with the sound of a turbine. 
The gauge on the front of the device showed (at least according to the users guide description) that the device in use. In the manual they wrote that a rotating inner ring means the RAID is being rebuilt and "rotating clockwise" (without mentioning which ring they throught of) means that the drive is in use. Now what I saw was the outer ring rotating clockwise, so I assumed it was "in use". I hoped that it's only doing some rebuild-like stuff and that the drive (and the fan) will be silent during normal use.
A couple of minutes (or half an hour? ... I don't remember) later the rotation of the outer ring stopped and was steadily glowing instead. However the fan did not spin down. I rebooted the whole bunch (I mean the Mac which also restarted the My Book) and after that the outer ring was glowing and the fan remained silent. If this is going to be the "normal/average" state, then I'll be satisfied.
My only worry is that I've found a blog post with a huge number of visitor comments where several dozen people complained about Western Digital drives and My Book appliances in general. I can only hope that Fortuna stays on my side as she used to.
PS: it seems that whatever the drive was doing previously, it has finished it and now it's pretty silent. Moreover it goes into standby mode after 10-20 minutes of inactivity and comes back automatically if you try to access something on it. However coming back from standby mode takes at least 30s. Anyway ... if the drive is going to work like it does at the moment, then we'll become good friends.
My first impression was that this was made as a perfect companion for a MacBook Pro ... just take a look at it and say that it was not designed to look nice beside a Mac. My second impression (after installing the driver and connecting to the Firewire port) that it's damned loud.
The fan turned on almost instantly and it was loud as hell. I went to the WD support site and looked for updates. There was no update for the driver, but there was a firmware update for the My Book. I uploaded the new firmware and after a restart of the My Book the fan did not spin up. Not instantly ... :-> I reconfigured the My Book to use RAID-1 (mirroring) instead of the default RAID-0 (striping), then started to move my stuff over to the My Book. The fan soon spinned up again with the sound of a turbine. The gauge on the front of the device showed (at least according to the users guide description) that the device in use. In the manual they wrote that a rotating inner ring means the RAID is being rebuilt and "rotating clockwise" (without mentioning which ring they throught of) means that the drive is in use. Now what I saw was the outer ring rotating clockwise, so I assumed it was "in use". I hoped that it's only doing some rebuild-like stuff and that the drive (and the fan) will be silent during normal use.A couple of minutes (or half an hour? ... I don't remember) later the rotation of the outer ring stopped and was steadily glowing instead. However the fan did not spin down. I rebooted the whole bunch (I mean the Mac which also restarted the My Book) and after that the outer ring was glowing and the fan remained silent. If this is going to be the "normal/average" state, then I'll be satisfied.
My only worry is that I've found a blog post with a huge number of visitor comments where several dozen people complained about Western Digital drives and My Book appliances in general.
I can only hope that Fortuna stays on my side as she used to. PS: it seems that whatever the drive was doing previously, it has finished it and now it's pretty silent. Moreover it goes into standby mode after 10-20 minutes of inactivity and comes back automatically if you try to access something on it. However coming back from standby mode takes at least 30s. Anyway ... if the drive is going to work like it does at the moment, then we'll become good friends.
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Comments
:-(
My Book components
Some details on the fan's VAPO technology can be found here. Sunon says that this VAPO bearing is a way better and more silent, than a conventional sleeve or ball bearing. However the My Book fan has an RPM of 6100 (!) which makes up for a lot of noise in itself.
You can find the fan spec also on Sunon's portal or go directly for the PDF.
Fan
Re: Fan
RPM control is missing
I'm not familiar with firmware hacking (neither do I know what sort of controller does the My Book have) and I'm not willing to spend months of my free time to get the necessary knowledge so I could hack the firmware of the My Book to add proper fan speed regulation. My only options are to either remove the fan completely and remove the outer enclosure as well to assure better self-ventillation, or replace the current fan with a slower and more silent one. I intend to go for the latter. Since I'm not putting heavy load on the My Book (actually it's barely used, mostly for torrents and watching videos), I think that a slower fan will do the job too.
I've already started to look for 50x50x10mm, 12V DC fans ... it seems that I'll not find one that is better than the slower (4300 RPM) Sunon model that I've already mentioned. So most probably I'll go for that one.
I have had so much trouble with this same exact drive
Benchmarks
which benchmarks do you mean?
I already have one result, but it's for writes and I didn't use any benchmarking tool. I started moving my movies directory (~50 GB) from the Mac's internal drive to the My Book, waited a minute, then issued a "df", waited one minute again and issued another "df". I calculated the speed from the difference of allocated space on the My Book. If I remember well, it was a bit over 10MB/s. I'll measure it again when I get home and I'll also look for a more sophisticated benchmarking tool.
first results
The disk write speed with a 1 GB file size, disabled file system cache and 720x486 8-bit video frame size: 43.2 MB/s
The read speed: 56.6 MB/s
The same with a 2048x1556 10-bit RGB video frame size: write speed was 47.4 MB/s, read speed was 57.3 MB/s.
Strange that I could not run this tool on the builtin drive of the MacBook Pro.
2. Xbench v1.3
The results:
Sequential accessUncached Write 70.99 43.59 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 39.38 22.28 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 4.13 1.21 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 56.12 28.21 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random access
Uncached Write 11.15 1.18 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 102.14 32.70 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 59.12 0.42 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 90.70 16.83 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Now these values are a lot more interesting, however I do not know what to think about the uncached reads with 4K blocks.
I could run this test for the internal drive in the MacBook Pro too. Here're the results:
Sequential accessUncached Write 55.32 33.96 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 51.83 29.32 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 57.11 16.71 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 60.34 30.32 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random access
Uncached Write 7.47 0.79 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 55.96 17.91 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 63.89 0.45 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 82.22 15.26 MB/sec [256K blocks]
These tests are definitely flawed in some way.
Useful knowledge base articles
Here's the list:
- How can I tell if the noise or sound my drive is making is normal?
- Why does my FireWire, USB, or Combo drive make a repeated clicking sound?
- Do Western Digital external hard drives spin down after a certain amount of inactivity time? How can I disable this feature?
- Improved fan behavior of the My Book Pro Edition II and My Book Premium Edition II Dual-drive Storage Systems.
- How to dismantle a My Book Pro Edition II, My Book Premium Edition II, or My Book World Edition II to replace a hard drive.
- How to rebuild a RAID 1 (Mirrored) array on a WD My Book Pro II or WD My Book Premium II Dual-drive System.
- What S.M.A.R.T. attributes are supported by WD EIDE and Serial ATA hard drives?
- Why do I encounter a "DRIVE IS UNREADABLE. PLEASE INITIALIZE OR EJECT" message when I connect my FireWire drive to my Mac?
- Is there a way to change Acoustic Management settings on Western Digital hard drives?
- What would void the warranty on my drive?
- Why does my benchmarking program indicate that my hard drive is performing slower than expected?
- What are the front lights on the WD My Book hard drive and what information do they provide?
- Will an X-Ray security machine (for instance, at an airport) harm the data on a hard drive?
- Specifications for the My Book Pro II external hard drive.
- How to change the RAID level of a WD My Book Premium II or WD My Book Pro II hard drive.
I also checked the support forums and have found that many Windows users complain about occasional lockups/hangs, when My Book does not respond. However I've not found any Mac issues so it seems to be a Windows-driver related one. I didn't experience any hangs on my Mac yet.the first "hang" :-(
I just started up and the "My Book RAID Manager" says that on the My Book the "Total capacity" is zero, the "Partitioning scheme" is "unknown", however it states the "RAID setting" is "RAID1" and that "RAID status" is "healthy". I can also access the contents of the My Book in Mac OS X. To tell the truth, this scares me a bit ...
I'll verify the HFS+ integrity on the device ... hopefully it's still intact.
PS: now that I think of this again ... it might be possible that the hang occured only, because I tried to shut down the Mac with the My Book being in sleep mode. I'll test this later.
check passed
Verifying volume “WD”
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Checking Catalog hierarchy.
Checking Extended Attributes file.
Checking volume bitmap.
Checking volume information.
The volume My Book appears to be OK.
Mounting Disk
1 HFS volume checked
Volume passed verification
I hope this true. I'll try to find a more robust filesystem integrity checking utility, because the Disk Utility did not go over the contents of the whole drive. It just checked filesystem metadata.
Same problem .... "Partitioning scheme" is "unknown"
Regards,
mark
no answer :-(
One interesting thing you might not have noticed yet: there's an update on WD's support site for the My Book Pro II RAID Manager!
no Mac changes :-(
Strange Happenings
But...
I have had the drive 'switch off' again on its own. What happens is the iMac reports device removed warning, it is the My Book that has failed, looking at the My Book, both the LED circles are flashing on / off every 1 sec. You unplug from power, still they flash. You then remove the FW800 from the My Book and they stop. Plug everything back and the drive pops up again on the iMac and all is OK.
(I have a iMac 24" (intel))
Mark
The same here ...
Today I've got the replacement fan for my My Book that I already wrote about. It took quite some time, hopefully it was worth it. I don't have a soldering iron at home, I'll have to borrow the one of my dad. I'll post the first impressions once I get there.
sleep while in use? :-o
Fan was silent
Fan Troubles
J
no new fan yet
How to prevent sleep mode
touch "/Volumes/My Book/.keepalive"sync
I've measured the inactivity timeout of the My Book using the above described command sequence and a stopwatch, and it turned out to be exactly 400s.
Now the only thing you have to do is set up a cron job to execute the touch+sync combo every 5-6 minutes.
Here's how to do that on a standard Mac OS X 10.4.9 installation (you can copy&paste this into a Terminal window since it does not require interaction):
[ ! -d ${HOME}/bin ] && mkdir ${HOME}/bin
cd ${HOME}/bin
cat <<EOF > wake_mybook.sh
#!/bin/sh
if [ -d "/Volumes/My Book" ]; then
touch "/Volumes/My Book/.keepalive"
sync
fi
EOF
chmod u+x wake_mybook.sh
crontab -l > .crontab
echo "0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * ${HOME}/wake_mybook.sh" >> .crontab
crontab .crontab
rm .crontab
exit
The above example schedules the mybook.sh shell script to run every 5 minutes. You can test whether it was set up successfully by checking at the next occasion -when it should run- the last access time of the .keepalive file on the My Book:
ls -l "/Volumes/My Book/.keepalive"If the last access time of the file gets updated every 5 minutes, then the job is running well.
PS: keeping the unit busy all the time will result (sooner or later) in the spin up of the fan. Thus you should first do something about the fan's noise before making the steps described here.
flipping the fan - bad idea
I'd strongly discourage you from doing this. The fan was placed like that on purpose!
It's simple physics: hot air goes upwards. The unit has a number of holes on it's top to allow hot air to leave. The fan is supposed to suck "cool" air from outside into the case at the bottom and "push out" the "hot" air -that got warmed up by the drives- on the top. If you flip the fan so that it's sucking air from the drive (instead of pushing air into the drive) at the bottom, it'll definitely loose a lot on cooling performance. It might still be able to cool the drives ... I don't know. But I wouldn't risk that one. The whole idea sounds to me like you wanted to ventilate a room full of smoke by flushing it down the toilet. Can this work?
Update: I've found an app (Temperature Monitor) that can read the temp. of the built-in drive of my MacBook Pro. Unfortunately it cannot read the temp. of the My Book's drives.
As I already wrote, I plan to replace the fan with another one that has lower RPM -thus it's a lot more quiet- instead of flipping the fan. Of course this will also result in lower performace ... we'll see how much.
Another cause for the sound can be obstacles in the way of air flow. If you look at the back side of the unit (and if you take a look on the inside as well), then you can see that the fan has to suck air through a number of small holes on the case and push the air through a number of holes again. If I'd make a clear opening on the case on both sides of the fan, then probably it'd make it a lot more silent. Of course such "modding" would instantly invalidate any warranty on the device, but I gave up on that one a long time ago. If the drive brakes one day I'll definitely not look for a replacement that would suck the same way as this one.
What about the new fan ?
I must first thank you for posting interesting facts and idea like you did.
Your last post if now nearly a month old. I was wondering if you had received your slower fan and how it performed...
Cya !
experiences with the new fan
However the best ("noiseless") solution would be if we could use a bigger fan (eg. a 70mm x 70mm), but with lower RPM. The bigger diameter would provide the same CFM performance and the lower RPM would mean even less noise. But a bigger fan can only be put to the original location, the back of the unit. There's not enough room on the bottom. Anyway, I'm now pleased with the noise level. However the random hangs are still a problem and it's definitely not a heat issue anymore.
How to take apart a 500GB My Book
Thanks for the link Alan!
My Book Pro II works! :-)))
- I've upgraded to Leopard on my MacBook Pro (actually not upgraded, but installed from scratch since I've bought a new 320GB Samsung hard drive for it).
- I've not installed any drivers like the "WD My Book Pro II RAID Manager bundle". I've just plugged in the drive after Leopard installation was ready and started to use it.
It has been working now over 10 days without any problems which is over any previous records (previously it has not worked for more than 24 hours without hanging). However knowing the issues others had with it, I'd not trust valuable data on the drive anymore (just torrents, videos, so stuff that I'd not miss in case the unit goes dead). And since I've not installed the WD RAID Manager bundle, I've no means of checking the RAID status ... so any of the drives could die without me knowing.Hi, I like the Drives
This product is great so far! I haven't had it for very long so I can't know whether it's going to break in 3 months time as another reviewer has said.
You can't go wrong with one of these. I Opened the box, plugged it in, connected the USB, went through a 5 minute installation and off I went...500GB of lovely disk space.
-Opal Ring