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

Whats your EFI version?
Have you tried these solutions posted on this thread, such as the downgrade Brianmay explained on page 5?

Thanks a lot

Hi,

I have EFI 1.2 and for me HDAPM works fine. I haven't tried any other soution.

Hi BrianMay27,

I got the circle with a forward slash also and I have a late 2008 Macbook Pro (5,1). Was looking forward to that. Never mind. I think I will have to do the HPADM business and set my disk to MAX.

cheers
eric

This fix is for macbook pros (5,4) There is no fix for 5,1 but when I have time ill try again

Ah, okay thanks. I have applied the HPADM fix to set the disk operation to MAX. This seems to have eliminated the wheel spins for now (whilst connected to my 24" Apple display). I am not too concerned about the reduced battery power at the moment as I mainly use it in this mode. I had a load cycle count of 52,201 after weeks of use.

the bug report just replied back

+11-May-2010 08:40 PM DARIN MARSHALL :+
+Engineering has provided the following feedback regarding this issue:+

+This is not an Apple qualified drive. For a replacement drive to work correctly in an Apple system, the drive needs to specify that it is for a Mac.+

just f'n ********, why have a user replaceable drive if we still have to get it Apple certified and pay for their ridiculously overpriced drives

Actually they can't say that. In the manual that comes with the mac it says you can replace the drive with ANY 2.5 inch drive. Reply back saying that and see what they say.

I just did, i will let you know if they reply back. Apple is definitely starting to **** me off though, all this locked down crap between drives and iPhones is ridiculous, enough already. You want people to use your stuff but lock it all down to annoy the people who actually know what they are doing

I so agree. I think they need to look at what people want. If they don't come up with a fix, part of me wants to see if the new 2010 model has the same problem and if not have them replace mine

I too have experienced the problems trying to use the 640GB wd drive. I recently bought a new one, did a full zero pass, partitioned HFS+, and then did a fresh install of Snow Leopard. I wound up with very slow response and glitchy (at best) video playback....terribly annoying.
After trying out the few mentioned "fixes" in this post unsuccessfully, I've decided this POS drive will have to live in an external enclosure until/if Apple/WD adddresses the issue. I grabbed a Hitachi (HD20500 IDK/5K) and am moving over to it now. I'll let you know how it performs.

Hello everyone,

I too have recently bought and installed a WD 500GB (WD5000BEVTRTL2) HDD into my June 2009 13" 2.2ghz Macbook Pro and am getting the same problems - whenever I click on anything I get the beachball - as though the hdd has to power up every time I click on anything. It also sounds like it's whirring away pretty much all the time. I'm using my macbook primarily for audio production and so getting this beach ball whenever I click to hear a sample makes the macbook pretty much useless.
I've tried the booting into older firmware but it seemed to improve things at first but now it's gone back to being slow, also hdcm (or whatever it was called) didn't seem to do much.
I'm going to resort to putting back in my 160gb internal and using the WD as external through USB2 for now but not happy.
I can't understand how it seems ok on some mbps and not others though.

Can I just ask - the firmware USB solution - do I need to do this on each boot up - because I'm sure it improved things initially but now it's gone back to being slow (and I haven't done software update)?

Cheers

You shouldn't have to. It should stay installed. Anyway one thing I will say is sometime this week I plan on going into the mac store and asking if I can try the hard drive in the mid 2010 macbook pro's and see if it works. If it does I will try to argue with them that they have known about this problem and have not come up with a solution in a reasonable amount of time and that they should upgrade me to a version that works...

It may not work, but worth a shot XP

Cheers Brian, please let us know how you get on.

Do you know if there are official hdds that will work without problems in the macbook pro? It seems that the most popular are WD and Seagate but if there are official hard drives I might just go for one of them - they can't be that much more than the WD/Seagate surely?

Cheers - if only I could afford a nice big SSD all these problems would go away!!

Hmm, Well In my attempt to get my comp up to 1.8 to go to the store I hjave found that 1.7 works as well and gives the user 3.0 GB/s function. And after 20 min of testing i have seen no problems. So I will say early looks is that 1.7 is safe.

I have just spoken to AppleCare and they said that because I cloned my original hdd the difference in sector size (or something) of the new hdd may be causing this and so has advised me to erase and do a clean install on the new hdd (as before I just cloned the original).

Has anyone tried this, had any joy with this? I will give this a try and report back but need to back up other stuff first.

Cheers