I’ve happily used WD Green internal SATA drives in my Mac Pro (Mid 2010) as well as my Sonnet Fusion D400QR caddy for a long time. 3TB, 4TB - no issues whatsoever. Now I ordered a batch of three 6TB WD Green drives - what could go wrong? Everything.
Drive no 1 emits a fearsome whining noise when powered up. Drive no 2 gives off a rather loud clicking sound whenever it is active, but might still be ok in principle. Drive no 3 only emits a short whine every minute or so when it is active.
However, the main problem is that I haven’t managed to even format any of these drives.
For both drive 2 and 3 the issues have been similar: The first attempt to format the drive in Disk Utility gets stuck about half way through, so I had to force quit DU. On the next attempt they showed up as parts of logical volume groups, with DU unable to format them. So I went into Terminal to delete the corresponding LVG using ‘cat /dev/random > /dev/disk1’. This enabled DU to format them again, but the process got stuck halfway through again. I also tried starting up from a 10.8 installer DVD and running DU from there, but by that time the drives were barely showing up at all.
After a few attempts, the end result is:
Drive 1 never bothered to show up at all, so this is definitely faulty.
Drive 2 shows up occasionally on reboot, but is completely unaccessible for any operations in DU or Terminal (see screenshots below).
Drive 3, like drive 1 is now completely invisible to DU or Terminal.
Anyone have similar experiences or any suggestions? Or shall I just return the whole batch?
