WD MyBook updates for Leopard compatibility

My "Home Edition 500GB" worked fine, until I wanted to use it as a Time Machine drive! It didn't work at all: Time Machine would do nothing. After Upgrading the firmware and installing the Manager, Time Machine started working. But I hate that menubar icon! I can't even quit it... such a waste of space. Come on WD, this does not go along well with our Macs nor your sleek external drives design.

Just as an FYI after I installed the WD software my time machine started giving me all sorts of grief. So be carefully if you want to install this.

@Peter Cole

I'm afraid not. Still no menu bar icon :(

I had problems with my drive spinning down after an idle period. So much so, that I bought another external drive to replace what I thought was a failing drive.

It turns out that with a simple cron task to write to the drive every 5 minutes it no longer had any trouble whatsoever. I'm now about 2 weeks into using this fix and have had no spinning down during that time.

The crontab I'm using is:

*/5 * * * * echo `date` > /Volumes/MASSIVE/tmp/date ; sleep 5 ; rm /Volumes/MASSIVE/tmp/date

Now I have even more HD space I don't know what I'll do with.

I have a MyBook Studio and it's worked perfect under both Tiger and Leopard (via FW800). I don't see a need at this time to update the firmware.

Should I apply the patch if all my My Books are used in a mixed Tiger/Leopard environment?

Odd timing as one of them has started unmounting recently ...

I bought a 1TB studio edition. It worked fine as a firewire drive after installing the above update (which actually came out several months ago, shortly after Leopard, IIRC), but had a nasty habit of spontaneously shutting down when used as an eSATA drive to my Linux box. It doesn't just pass the SATA/SCSI commands through, it has a whole firmware emulation layer which tries to protect the host from behaviour like going into standby but doesn't work properly.

As the main use to which I was putting it was my EyeTV Archive, in the end I took the drive itself out and put it in my iMac. And wasn't *that* an adventure!

Sadly the remaining enclosure doesn't seem to recognise other drives (even WD ones, such as the one that came out of my iMac).

Personally I wish you could turn the lights off completely. I have a number of drives and I'll admit I bought them for the styling since I have to have them on display, when the room is darker though I really don't appreciate having the place filled with a stupid blue light.

Indeed - no update for the Premium version. WTF? Seriously, I hope they release the update within the next days..

I installed the WD Drive Manager and latest fw for my WD Pro 250GB, but I don't get the Menu bar icon..