How quiet is your MyBook?

WD External Drives External Drives for Mac
1

I got a new MyBook Elite 1.5TB over the weekend.

I expected the drive to be as silent as the internal 250GB in my iMac, but it’s quite noisy. I assume this is because the casing is mostly open because of the vents, and thus it’s not as muted as the internal drive. The noise I hear is just the platters spinning and some read/write.

Last night, however, it started doing something strange. For a while after any disk activity, all i can hear is the spinning, but then I can hear the heads “unpark” and a constant read/write drone. The activity light doesn’t blink and it happens whether the iMac is on or off, so it seems isolated to the disk itself. My old 80GB WD Caviar in a generic enclosure does this as well, but not every time. This started happening after I was done copying about 200GB in chunks throughout the day.

The drive passes the SMART test and the short drive test, haven’t done the long test. Everything seems ok, so should I be worried?

How quiet is your drive?

2

There shouldn’t be any issue with this.  The drive is simply doing it’s own housekeeping, checking for errors, etc.  The thing is that Mac’s continue to supply power to the ports even when they are off, so the drive thinks that the computer is on, and is waiting for instructions, after a while it should go into sleep mode if you have it turned on.  If you want the drive to really go off, when you turn off the Mac, make sure to safely remove it before powering off the Mac, and then disconnect the data cable to the drive.

3

Thanks Bill.

I have since found a thread on one of the other boards explaining the same problem… waiting for feedback from the engineers.

Till we find out exactly what is going on, I’m assuming it’s normal and I’m not going to worry about it.

4

That’s what I’d do.