Another WD My Book Studio LX Sleep unmount situation

WD External Drives External Drives for Mac
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I just installed 2 FW 800 daisy-chained WD My Book Studio LX 2T drives on my iMac running OS X (Snow Leopard), updating both the firmware and SmartWare application per the latest releases (as of 1/4/2011).  All good and running in a normal active situation, but when the disks go into sleep mode, they unmount from the OS and disappear from the desktop.  I can use the SmartWare application running in the background to manually remount the drives, but this is very sub-optimal as I use the external drive as my iTunes and iPhoto server, both of which are disabled as soon as the drive unmounts.

I have used the SmartWare app to reset the Sleep timer to “Never”, but  haven’t been able to test effectiveness yet.  Ultimately, I’d like the drives to be able to sleep in low-usage situations and get spun-up by the OS when they are needed.

I have read through the knowledge base for other suggestions and can see others with this issue, but not any resolutions.  I reconfirmed my setup and have the drives both independently hooked to the power supply, which one post recommended.

Any ideas / suggestions to get this resolved?

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Have you resolved this issue? If not, 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

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Not resolved.  I have changed my iMac settings to have the machine never sleep.  makes it so i don’t have to manually remount as often, but the external HD still discount occasionally without reason.

Suggestion sent from support was to replace all firewire cords and recheck power supply.  I get the feeling that this would be a complete waste of time and money and is just an attempt to defer further responses, which worked as you can tell from the delay in my response.

Overall, not impressed with this product and the manufacturer’s denial of a problem to date - just look at the many other similar issues reported in this forum.  Unfortunately at this time, I would suggest people look at other products until future firmware enhancements resolve this.