Will the WD Black² 128GB SSD + 1 TB work on Mac Mini, Win7 running WMC

I have a Windows Mediacenter (Win 7 32 bit) running on my Mac Mini mid 2010. The current 1 Tb SATA drive is starting to fail after running nonstop for 2 years.

The question is whether the WD Black² WD1001X06XDTL 1 TB could be a good replacement. 

  • The Mac Mini has a SATA 300 interface, would this work on SATA 600 disk?
  • The Mac needs a Mac OS partition. It cannot run Windows alone. I am not using the Mac partition. I boot directly in Win7. Will this give any problems? I can understand that there is no Mac support, but is this only the 1 TB partition which isn’t supported? Because I do not expect to access the 1 TB partition from Mac OS as I do not use the Mac partition.
  • I expect to clone the drive using the supplied cable. I will delete all recorded TV to get under the 120 Gb limit and then clone both the windows and mac partition to the new WD Black2 drive. Shouldn’t this work like a charm? It will be very time consuming to do a clean install as I need to install Mac OS first, then Windows 7 and then configure the Mediacenter applications with tuners, channels, programme guide etc. So I would really like to do a clone.
  • Is the clone cable always in the pack or do I need to check that this is part of the disk I purchase?
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Hi, and welcome to the WD community.

The unit is backwards compatible and also comes with the USB cable included. Regarding the way you intend to use the unit, you won’t have any problems since you can clone/install windows with no issues. After the 1 TB partition is activated you should be able to transfer your recorded TV. 

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I purchased the disk and based on your reply expected the cloning to run smoothly. However I cannot even get the cloning to start. I cannot select at the target drive for my cloning it is greyed out. What can the problem be?

I have deleted more or less all programs, so windows is down to its bare minimum and as far as I can calculate there should be enough space for the partitions.

I have a mac partition: 18 Gb - 12 Gb used = 6 Gb

Windows partition: 913 Gb - 838 Gb = 75 Gb

Total: 81 Gb (that should fit in 110 Gb space)

Here are some screenshots

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8LTFq3lR0YbS3JQN0dnb2lGUmc/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8LTFq3lR0Ybbk1zVkpVTlRGRk0/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8LTFq3lR0YbUHdvcFJWUFE2cms/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8LTFq3lR0YbcGVyNGQ1RlgyUHM/view?usp=sharing

I can see on the Source screenshot that there is an unsupported partition as well (120 Mb) can that be the problem? I am unsure what this is used for. Could be the mac bootcamp partition? Not sure. But I expect that should be the 200 Mb partition that is the bootcamp partition. And that seems to be supported.

On the Target screenshot there is a link, bottom left, where it says “What to exclude” but that link is dead, nothing happens when pressing this (a small dialog without content pops up and disseappears within a half second)

Help I very much appreaciated, else I will have to return the drive as I does not meet my expectations regarding easy cloning.

Any WD staff in this forum who can help out?

Is the supplied cloning software just not capable of working as described?

Maybe you should try contacting WD’s Technical Support about this. You can do so either by phone or email.

To Contact WD for Technical Support
http://support.wdc.com/contact/index.asp?lang=en

Support by Country
http://support.wdc.com/country/index.asp

Regards,

The cloning software should work fine with the WD Black2. I’ve used it several times in testing. Do you have the latest version of the Acronis software? Are you sure that the data on the drive you select is under 120GB? Also, if you are using the automatic clone method, try choosing the manual method or vice versa.

I have saw a few rare cases where programs are running and the clone software cannot be ran in Windows. You could try creating the Acronis Bootable Media and then booting from a CD/USB stick and see if the clone will work in DOS. It can be found in the main Acronis user interface (usually called Bootable Media or Rescue Media) or in the Start Menu under Acronis > Tools and Utilities.

As a final note, did you check the FAQs on the product to make sure that your system doesn’t have one of the incompatible chipsets? You can find the FAQ section in the product page ( http://wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=1190))

The data on the drive is less than 120 Gb as you can see on the supplied screenshots. And I have downloaded newest Acronis under the product page as the supplied key links to.

I have tried both manual and and automatic mode, but both have same problem. I cannot select the target disk.

I cannot see anything about incompatible chipset on the FAQ page:  http://wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=1190#Tab2&Tab10

And I expect that the chipset on the WD Black2 is supported. This is the disk which I cannot select.

The software runs fine in windows. However I cannot select my new WD Black2 as target.

Please read the complete thread and check my attached screenshots.

The final conclusion is that the WD Black² isn’t compatible with Mac at all. My Mac Mini will cannot see the drive when installed. So there is no way of installing Mac OS on the disk. It took a couple of weeks with to get an answer on my WD support ticket that I raised. I also tested it my self. There is no contact to the disk either from the cloning SW or from when it is installed inside the Mac. So all the info I have received from WD staff on this forum was useless. :frowning:

100% - this drive WILL work on a mac. I am running a MacBook Pro i7 mid 2012, 16Gig RAM (third party), Yosemite - 10.10.2.  
No Problems at all. I simply followed the 
http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/UM/ENG/2779-800001.pdf
Step by step. NO errors, NO redo, simply “cloned” my existing drive as instructed and 100% wonder! (14 sec boot) - I also run Parallels - Win 7 & 8 with no problems. this is a wonderful drive. I have been making my living in computers for over 35 years and the instructions ARE important! WD leaves nothing out - as an “installer” I had to follow these instructions, leaving nothing out. Please contact me if you have any questions!