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

no luck, I see the files on the usb drive (4 files, efi, rom, rominmage, .png) When I reboot, hold option key, the usb drive shows up but when I select it I just get a circle with a line through it and it won't continue,,, Oh well, Back to HDAPM

Ah looks like you have a macbook not a macbook pro.. I dont know what to do for those. I wish they made downgrading easer

yeah, ok cool, thx for the info anyway, Hopefully Apple with do something about this

@brianmay

Wanted to let you know that the steps you posted for rolling back the EFI firmware back to 1.6 on a Mid-2009 MacBook Pro worked perfectly in resolving this problem.

I have the Mid-2009 MacBook Pro, and installed a Western Digital Scorpio Blue 250GB (WD2500BEVT) hard drive in the unit, giving me the same exact problems and symptoms described in this thread. Even during installation of 10.6 from the OS disc, it would take 3-4 times as long to install, or sometimes not even install at all (would just get stuck with no movement on the status bar about half-way through). When I did get the OS to install, the hard drive would constantly stall any time data was being accessed off the drive, and constantly give me the "beach ball of death" as it waited on the drive.

Found this thread, and followed your steps. Restored your DMG to a thumb drive, booted to it, it automatically installed the 1.6 firmware, and then booted to the Snow Leopard disc to install the OS, and have not had any problems with it since.

The 1.7 update is confusing to me, considering the update was supposed to FIX SATA II (3.0 Gbps) drive problems, where as in this case, the update actually made things worse. Did Apple ever get back to you on this specific problem?

Thanks again so much brian, you are a life saver!

Ditto for the WD 1TB 12.5mm drive I just tried in my MBP (unibody). Drive fits perfectly physically, but MBP cannot handle the current demands. Boots up but after less than a few minutes, goes into a hang that required holding down the power button to force quit.

Same drive runs fine on USB so it is not the drive.

Wonder what the internal +5 to the connector is spec'ed at. Also, the thin ribbon cable going to the internal SATA may not be able to handle the current.

Oh, well, got to clean up my 500GB drive instead.

I have been having trouble putting in a Western Digital Scorpio Blue 1.0TB Hard Drive. With SuperDuper cloning software it timed out halfway through the copy. I had 150 Gigs of free space on the local hard drive and it filled up during the first cloning attempt. In order to boot into the drive again I ran the Snow Leopard install disk and ran the terminal to go into some of my downloads and delete to free up space.

Then I was able to boot up with about 50 MB of free space. I ran Disk Inventory X and OmniDiskSweeper and they turned up nothing helpful. Actually they both said I still had the 150 GB available. After emailing Shirt Pocket Support, the makers of SuperDuper, they recommended I delete the items in the Volumes directory. I found two volumes mounted there by navigating to that directory with the Terminal app. Then I removed the two files: "MacBook Pro HD" and "MacBook Pro HD1".

sudo rm -dRf "MacBook Pro HD"

If someone else attempts this and it doesn't work, go down into the directory one level. sudo is to delete overriding the system owned files, -d removes directories, -R is recursively meaning nested directories, and -f for non-verbose mode overriding asking if you are sure you want to delete a file. Then all the space returned.

Next, I was able to get SuperDuper to clone the drive but not boot into the new drive in an external case. And the drive would power down after 15 or 30 seconds if I didn't do anything and then became inaccessible from the computer. The drive however worked once I put it in about 3 hours ago and continues to work. If it stops working I will be back to ask if anyone has some further insight on my SATA drive upgrade.

Enjoy!
Shaun

Message was edited by: Shaun English

did you try and do the HDAPM trick to keep the drive from spinning down. It really does not make sense that there is not enough power to it, most drives if not all that size draw pretty much the same power plus if the usb can power it then the internal power should be able to, Here is a place to get the HDAPM files from http://mckinlay.net.nz/hdapm/

@brianmay27:

The roll-back to EFI 1.6 worked perfectly on my Mid-2009 13" MBP with 500 GB WD (WD5000BEVT-22A0RT0)

Pre-Rollback:

While on EFI 1.7 I was using HDAPM to keep the drive from spinning down and I experienced no lags, beachballing, etc..

After-Rollback:

So far with my initial tests all the beach-balling, delays and lag I had with EFI 1.7 were gone. And this WITHOUT using HDAPM. So clearly it appears to be an issue with the EFI.

HOWEVER.. without HDAPM on EFI 1.6 my drive starts racking up Load/Unload Cycle counts excessively, to the point of approximately 180 / hr.

So while the roll-back fixed all the lags and delays found when using EFI 1.7, I'm still using HDAPM on 1.6 to keep the drive from spinning down and keep a respectable Load/Unload Cycle rate.

Anyone else experience this after the roll-back?

Hi guys,

I wanted to throw in my two pence as well.

I bought the WD Scorpion Blue 500gb HD on Tuesday. Once installed i found the hard drive making a loud whooshing sound (i initially thought it was the exhaust but it was definitely the HD) along with the constant parking/reparking sound.

I returned the hard drive, and although i went back with the intention of replacing with the Seagate Momentous HD, it was unfortunately out of stock so i bought the Hitachi TravelStar 500gb instead. The drive is much quieter than the Scorpion Blue. The whooshing sound is still present but nowhere near as loud but nor is it as quiet as the stock drive.

I can't hear the parking reparking sound either. I am not sure what you guys are using to establish the load cycle - let me know if its different to what i am using - but i installed Smart Utility trial version and my load cycle is on 254. I am not sure if this is good or bad after 3 hours of use including a 70GB restore from Time Machine.

Hopefully the drive won't become a 'death star' or exhibit the beachballing/lagging in the coming weeks and months.

Its all a bit annoying and far too much trouble to have to go through just to replace a drive.

Good luck to everyone else.

I'm using smartctl since it is free. The load cycle should only go up by 1 every time the HD goes to sleep and you wake it up (For example when you close the lid and open it again or after sitting there for several minutes without doing anything). 254 after only 3 hours is about 84 an hour. That is a lot of on and off that includes a TM restore.

I don't know how Smart Utility works but with smartctl I would do something like: open a file, surf the web, move around the computer but nothing demanding and check the load cycle count after a minute or more and see how much it goes up. Then I would install the HDAPM trick and do the same thing. The difference for me in the numbers alone were huge. If it goes up without the HDAPM trick by several numbers in one minute while doing these little things I believe you have the same problem with the drive.

Message was edited by: StephenCCH

Good!!

Glad to hear this works as well with the WD.
I did call apple and they did send it to the engineering team. I have not hear much which ether means that they have no idea or they didn't look at it. I will e-mail them again for an update. Hopefully they will come up with an update this time.

SSOSX:

According to Seagate's documentation, I believe the drive you have is rated around 600,000 load cycles. (Take a look a Seagate's documentation)

So extrapolating your rate of ~84/hour (254 load cycles in 3 hours), that results in only ~7100 hrs or 296 days before the drive reaches its rated load cycle value.

But now this all depends on how much faith you put into these numbers, specifically the rated amounts.

Either way I would suggest installing HDAPM and just have it load as a Launch Daemon. I'm doing that now with my 500GB WD and I barely see any impact on my battery life and keeps my load cycles down to a reasonable level.

Just sent apple an e-mail asking for an update, they said they closed the case because it has been "solved" and that there doesnt look to be any work being done to come out with a new EFI firmware... It may help if everyone sends an e-mail to apple telling them this is a problem and you want a fix to come out

Well you guys were entirely right. By the end of the day the hard drive had clocked up 506 cycles. So i performed the HDAPM trick which affected it considerably. In the past 4 days or so the load cycle has gone up by only a few - currently on 517.

So the hard drive itself is performing well but the HDAPM fix is necessary nonetheless.

I've replaced my OEM drive with the WD Scorpio Blue 640, had the whirring/clicking, spent MANY hours trying to solve it, including the hdamp trick (confirmed in Console), disabling the motion sensor, resetting the pram, and a few other voodoo tricks. No luck. I'm still averaging around 100 load cycles per hour (9918 after 103 hours). I've researched Seagates and Hitachis, and I see similar complaints among a significant portion of MBP users.

If someone can suggest a replacement drive in the $80-100 price range that definitely won't have this problem, let me know. I've found threads from almost a year ago hoping for a firmware fix, but I'm not counting on that, and I suspect a ton of people have this problem and are blissfully unaware. I'm really worn out and frustrated, and I'm reluctant to replace my GF's failing MBP drive till I figure this out.

Anyone have a real solution? Does Apple really not give a **** about this issue?