MacKozer

WD MyBook Home FW400 not for iMacs at least in the FW mode

Posted on June 14, 2009 by admin

Wise after the event. That proverb fits like a glove to my person. Sometimes, fortunately not very frequent, I buy things quickly, come to the shop, decide to purchase and leave with a product. For a long time I had the intention of buying an external FireWire drive, which would relive my drive and would be quickly accessible bank of photographs, and Time Machine backups. My intentions were quite unspecified. Turning couple of days ago by one of the shopping malls I decided to look into the computer store (just a store, not the Apple Store). I left the store with a new FireWire 500GB WD MyBook Home drive.

Indeed, the drive looks great – glossy black aluminum casing, stylized to the book, here is the LED on the front control panel, and the ventilation holes, in shape of dots and lines of Morse code, stacking in the English words like “personal”, “reliable “,” innovative “,” simple “, and” design. Unfortunately, it appears that this product marked on its box as a compatible with Mac OS X 10.5.2 or above, is not all that reliable or easy to use – indeed, it is not compatible with a large percentage of iMacs and while it is connected via FW Mac OS X 10.5 does not see nor mount it.

When I unpacked the drive and connected it to my iMac next half of hour I spent on restarting, plugging and unplugging My Book Home. Unfortunately without any result. To examine that the WD MyBook Home is fine I have pugged it via FW to my MacBook. It was recognized and worked fine. I began to worry about FireWire port in my iMac. Was it broken? So I began to poke at Google. It turned out that there are hundreds of people around the world with a similar problem. Any solution, which I tried, and many before me, did not give a positive result. Not helped drive firmware update. The FireWire issue of MyBook Home connected to iMac has been well known for over 2 years and so far the company has not responded to it. There is no mention about that problem as if it never existed. Of course, WD MyBook home is also equipped with a USB 2.0, and thus operate without problems. This is not a solution in the absence of a FireWire. If I had wanted a USB version, I would have bought a model that is more than 25 Euro cheaper, and designed in the same style.

What wonders me is why Western Digital has not found a solution to this problem. Is seems that WD wants to brush it under the carpet. Perhaps the problem also lies on the Apple iMac side but I have also found a few opinions about similar problems while WD MyBook Home FW were connected with PC machines.

So far the only recipe that I could find on the network is to connect the drive via FireWire hub. If anyone of you knows any solution to this problem please let me know in a comment.

The USB drive as it seems to work well, and its smaller brother (my passport) has never made any problems. Although the My Book has its own power, it turns on and off together with my iMac. So I do not have to worry about these things. The USB only version of MyBook Home would get a really favorable review, but FW version is rather a bad choice for a iMac user. Western Digital stylists should add another text in Morse code to the MyBook Home FireWire version: *** – - – *** (SOS).