Western Digital Scorpio Blue 640 Drive draws too much power in a MacBookPro

Thanks guys - better get my plastic out and hope all goes well this time! 🙂

The problem seems be fixed after updated system to 10.6.4

10.6.4 didn't make any difference for my Scorpio Blue 500GB. It continues to constantly spin up and down.

This is really starting to ** me off. Why hasnt apple done anything about this.

Let me get this straight: You buy a disk that isn't designed for general-purpose laptop use, and you're ****** at Apple because it has problems??

ummmmmm yeah, I would expect my laptop that has a user upgradeable hard drive to be able to properly handle a well know WD drive, I dont think that is too much to ask for

Just an update: after installing my Hitachi 5K500.B 500 GB 5400 rpm everything appeared great, nice and quiet and lots more room!! But... when it is very quiet I do notice a slight spinning down and the odd click...!! No spinning ball though and no lag - so not sure if this is a problem or not?

Ummmm. yeah, the manual says it suports any 2.5 inch sata drive. so yes i expect that this, a well known brand drive to work!

Did you downgrade the Firmware to 1.6? After installing 10.6.4 i had the spin down problem again, it was fixed when I installed the 1.7 Firmware for my Unibody Macbook Pro. But also i have a new HDD now form WD via RMA and it works like a charme.
Greets

Still on 10.5.8 - thankfully! 🙂

Its quiet here tonight and I can clearly hear this Hitachi drive spinning down almost to silent, then a click, then spinning up again!! So - is this yet another drive that won't work in the Macbook?? Could any of the others with this drive comment please as it looks like I will have to rip it out and bin it like I did the WD?

Ok - just for anyone who is still monitoring this thread or who comes here with spin down and clicking issues like I did - I did a check on my recently installed Hitachi 5K500.B 500mb 5400rpm HDD last night (well early this morning!) and found 5700 load cycles - that is after about a week's use!!! After exhausting my free goes with SMART Utility I downloaded smrtctl and eventually figured out that it gives you a little icon on the menu bar that if you click it tells you all about your HDD smart details (amazingly simple and stunningly good value being free!!! But dear lord wouldn't it be great if these things came with user hints a mere mortal could understand!!) - anyway by then my load cycles were up to 6054!!!. I could hear the **** drive getting quieter and quieter then up it would spin again - have to say you need to be quiet to hear this with the little Hitachi drive - not like the WD, it's wooshing was easy to detect.

Anyway, after another hour trying to understand various conflicting installation instructions I eventually got HDAPM up and running and since then my load cycles have been, wait for it, 1! And that was when I sent my Macbook to sleep last night I suppose!

So, the upshot is... just because your drive isn't lagging desperately with the beach ball displaying all the time, doesn't mean it is behaving properly in your Macbook. These new SMART drives don't like Macbooks, or Macbooks don't like these new drives - whatever, waiting for Apple to sort it out will take for ever because your basic Mac users on the whole are not the sort to go swapping HDD about (all present company excepted of course!) - if I had left this untouched I would have had nearly 315,000 load cycles by the end of one year... depends on the drive of course but from what I read here and elsewhere not a sensible situation - in fact I think smrtctl is reporting my drive is already in "old_age" poor thing!

Hope this helps anyone who like me thought the Hitachi would just work straight out of the box - would that computing life was so simple 🙂

well here is the reply I got from Apple bug reporting

*While any 2.5 inch drive will work, not all features will be supported. The energy saving features, allowing the drive to spin down, are not supported in all third-party drives.*

so its not looking good guys, Apple can suck it at this point.

This really is too much. I can't believe that I can't just by a replacement drive that will work. I thought that the Hitachi drive would be the answer, but apparently not.

It just shouldn't be this hard. I switched to Mac in late 2008, but as soon as I can afford a replacement I will be moving back to Windows. While Windows 7 may not be as polished as OSX, I have never run into problems like this.

In addition to this problem the upgrade to 10.6.3 broke my Samsung CLP-310 printer (along with everyone else with this printer and the CLP-315)- and this wasn't fixed in 10.6.4. This is despite these printers being listed as official Apple supported printers.

I have just had enough.

Hi Timiambeing,

Are you able to provide the instructions that you followed to get the HDAPM to work.

Many thanks.

Hi there - I finally settled on these instructions at:

http://mymacfixes.blogspot.com/2009/06/how-do-i-stop-clicking-noise-from-hard.ht ml

seems like a step-by-step but some knowledge of what you are doing is presumed (as per usual). I didn't get anywhere with the hdapm link on these instructions as it downloaded as a "package" which I then auto installed, only to find I just ended up with a daemon but with all the wrong settings in it -which took a while for me to get rid of! I eventually went here and downloaded this one:

http://mckinlay.net.nz/files/hdapm.dmg

you can tell it's the right one as when you have downloaded it and clicked to mount, the .dmg you will see in Finder contains a little file called hdapm, plus hdapm.plist plus a read me text file (not a package) - it's this hdapm file you copy to where the instructions say.

You will need this (as it says in the instructions):

http://sourceforge.net/projects/lingon/files/Lingon/2.1.1/Lingon-2.1.1.zip/downl oad

and when it briefly says "With Lingon, create a new launchd configuration file" it just means you press the "plus" button on the menu bar for a "New" whatever the **** a "launchd" is! Then just follow the instructions as they will make sense when you are in Lingon doing it. As he says you can see what your user name is (for where you type "com.yourusername.launchd.hdapm" and replace the yourusername bit) as it is displayed in Finder on your Mac next to the little house symbol in the sidebar.

Best of luck - don't do it at 1am like I did, although I must say I slept well after a successful install 🙂

PS. all the bits about "authenticate" really through me, where? how? when actually all he meant was you will get asked for your Mac password at some stage so type it in to proceed!

Tim