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

hey guys, I have a 13" silver Macbook unibody, right before they turned the whole line into Macbook pro's, I just installed a 500gb WG 5400rpm drive and noticed the spin down issue right away, HDAPM did fix this for me but I am wondering if Apple will ever release a permanent update because I noticed yesterday for some reason the hdapm never loaded, I had to re-download the file and overwrite it in the utilities folder, its almost as if the original got corrupted somehow. I would rather Apple just fix this then me have to worry each time when i turn my laptop on on whether or not the hard drive will act up

I had this exact problem and video, that was not HD, was unwatchable because of it. I have read the whole thread and I was shocked to find out it was the new HD. I just had it upgraded about a week ago (along with a logic board replacement) and it already has 16,302 for the load cycle count (according to smartctl) :shock:.
I installed hdapm and the load cycle counting has almost stopped and video plays smooth again. I wonder how many this hard drive can handle? Anyone else have some numbers on their load cycle count after finding this out?

Message was edited by: StephenCCH

I've exact the same symptoms - stucking movies and un-responsive system all the time for like 2-3 seconds and bought the WD640GB just a week ago. Any tweak here wasn't helping at all and so the only deal was for me to clone all back to my WD500GB and now everything runs smooth and preferment as I'm used to........The Aja system check even resulted in a much faster performance for the 640GB model --> 70mb/s (54mb/s for the 500GB model).
How sad that we're not able for that extra mile/space and obviously we've to wait until something better comes along what actually doesn't cost over 1.5k --> 512GB SSD for example.

This is really starting to **** me off. Why hasnt apple done anything about this. And do they even read the forums? So far I can't find any contact on the site to send them an e-mail telling them they have a problem. And Im not going to the mac store because they will not do anything about it. There is no where on either apple or WD's site saying it does not work.

I have just contributed to another thread here, I have also just installed the WD Scorpio Blue 500gb and low and behold, whooshing in and out and spinning down and lags whilst it fires up again are par for the course. This drive is out of my Macbook late 2008 Unibody as of now and on it's way back to DABS (well as soon as I finish typing this!) and back in goes the lovely little Hitachi totally, utterly, silent and fast 160gb drive. I will watch this thread closely for any update on a much more compatible drive (no whooshing! No spinning down all the time!) - thanks for all the posts! Tim.

Well I tried the samsung 640 drive with same behavior. Im calling apple support now to try to get something done about it

Like several others, I am bitten by the same problem and found this with a search. Like the OP, I have a pre-unibody MBP. I bought a 500GB WD hard drive (WD5000BEVT), which I installed the other day. Then I noticed it spinning up and down constantly. Load cycles are going up and up.

hdapm doesn't work for me. When I run e.g. hdapm disk0 max, I get the error
"dyld: unknown required load command 0x80000022
Trace/BPT trap"

I'm willing to replace the drive, but is there any drive in the 500GB or larger size which is not going to suffer from this problem, short of buying an Apple drive ? I am disgusted by this behavior, but swapping back in the old Hitachi (IIRC) 200GB is something I also don't want to do.

I am in exactly the same position as the post above.

I have a late 2008 Unibody MacBook, and I upgraded to WD Scorpio Blue 500GB.

It surprised me greatly that I have had this problem, as the Scorpio Blue drive was highly recommended by many. I am now just going to use this drive as a backup drive.

I have heard on the grape vine that the Hitachi 500GB Travelstar 7K500 works very well with MacBooks. May be I will try that one.

Message was edited by: Casho3

Please let us know how you get on if you do try the Hitachi - in fact when I put my stock drive back in I realised it was in fact a Toshiba! My local Apple store (who usually know a little less than I do about such matter!) tell me Apple sprinkle fairy dust on their drives and that's why they "just work"! 🙂 Quite believe it, just wish their fairy dust didn't make them double the price of retail off the shelf version of the same drive :-/

I believe i have a solution! Im going to call apple today and update them on the status.

However the problem is the EFI firmware, unfortunately the older version is only sata 1.5. The solution that fixed my drive and I think it would work for the WD as well is to go back to EFI 1.6. Note This was tested in a mid-2009 unibody macbook pro. to downgrade (well I guess upgrade ;))

1) Download the linked .dmg file.

http://rapidshare.com/files/27518861...o_Recovery.dmg

2) do not mount file

3) plug in a usb drive any size

4) REformat this USB drive in Mac OSX HFS+ Journaled in disk utility.

5) Click on the newly formatted drive Volume, then click on the tab restore (same row as erase).

6) in this panel you will see two white input boxes, in source you will browse and select the .dmg downloaded in step 1, you can either brose it or drag and drop it in the source bow.

7) in the Destination box, drag and drop the newly formatted Volume from step 4/5

* no need to have the erase destination box checked/ticked.

8) hit the restore button/

9) once this is done, unplug and replug the usb drive, shut down the machine

10) boot up the machine while its booting up, before the apple icon pops up, press and hold the OPTION button until your drives/partitions pop up.

11) in my case i had three pop up, my bootcamp partition my main mac harddrive, and the BOOTABLE USB drive i just made, select the bootable USB drive (yellow orangish color) Use Arrows to navigate and Enter button to select

12) once this is selected the apple logo will come up and a dark gray bar will start to move right under it. Sit relax and wait for the process to be done.

END: you have now downgraded to EFI firmware 1.6

If you get this error

"Image Error:

Could not find any scan information. The source image needs to be imagescanned before it can be restored."

Click on the image file in the list on the left and then click on Image in the menu and then on Scan Image for Restore. After that, everything should go smoothly.


My hard drive now runs smoothly and i was able to install snow leopard. For those that have a WD, tell me if this solves it? Im interested to see if thats the problem

your link for the FW does not work 😟

i download 1.6 and follow your steps to a t but I cannot get the drive to show up as a boot volume on startup, all that shows up is my macbook drive and boot camp partition, I didnt know Macbooks can boot off usb by the way, I thought only Firewire?

Woops sorry, the link is http://rapidshare.com/files/275188610/AluminumMacBook_ProRecovery.dmg

As for the USB, it can boot off a usb, but the firmware is different then this file, this one allows you too boot off of it

ok cool, thank you, will try today

Yeah tell me if it works, I would really like to send the samsung drive back and get the WD again since the samsung takes liek 2x the amount of power :/