Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB drive - anyone using these in internal bay

Out of curiosity did you prepare the drive properly? Most new bare drives have not been partitioned for use on the Mac and also are formatted FAT32. Consider doing the following;

Extended Hard Drive Preparation

1. Open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder. If you need to reformat your startup volume, then you must boot from your OS X Installer Disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Installer menu (Utilities menu for Tiger or Leopard.)

2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Note the SMART status of the drive in DU's status area. If it does not say "Verified" then the drive is failing or has failed and will need replacing. SMART info will not be reported on external drives. Otherwise, click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.

3. Set the number of partitions from the drop down menu (use 1 partition unless you wish to make more.) Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID (only required for Intel Macs) then click on the OK button. Click on the Partition button and wait until the process has completed.

4. Select the volume you just created (this is the sub-entry under the drive entry) from the left side list. Click on the Erase tab in the DU main window.

5. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, check the button for Zero Data and click on OK to return to the Erase window.

6. Click on the Erase button. The format process can take up to several hours depending upon the drive size.

I have seen elsewhere some mention that WD drives have some configuration jumpers. You might check the information about the drive's configuration at the WD support site to be sure that the drive is correctly configured (if there is a need to do so, that is.)

Six weeks ago, I upgraded the Seagate 320MB on my new Mac Pro to a WD Caviar Green 1TB drive, which died within a day whilst I transferred the old system on to it. Amazon stopped supplying them at about the same time and gave me a full refund.

And the original Seagate 500MB drive on my older Mac Pro started making clicking sounds last week. I salvaged all the data but it's definitely on its way out. And this week, my six-month-old WD 1TB MyBook died.

S'funny how hard drive crashes come in threes. Haven't had a drive crash in 20+ years of using a Mac. But the odds are we've all got it coming. Seems that neither WD or Seagate is immune.

I have a Green ready to buy, $99
http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Cache-Green-WD10EADS/dp/B001IEZX3G

Maybe they or the merchant was out, or WD has a new revision?

< Sounds like time to make a backup! >

If you've never used a sparse disk image, they are handy and work well if you just want it for backup, or the odd chance it needs to be restored, but don't necessarily need to devote or create another boot partition.

I have a large volume and keep images of a number of drives on it, some as large as 200GB (the volume is 1.8TB).

I'm using 4 of these drives in my MacPro configured in RAID 10 with no problems. I am using an external drive on FW800 for the Startup Disk... Everything has been perfect so far!