Heads-up on Western Digital Drives

John Bowling, from the City of Houston, Dept. of Aviation, sent me the following.

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Just ran into a situation that I believe others should be aware of. I use a Mac Pro for editing and wanting the best performance I could get out of it, I swapped out the original boot drive with a Western Digital Raptor 10k rpm, 150G drive about a year ago. The performance increase has been noticeable. Perhaps not earthshaking but every little bit helps.

The problem recently surfaced as I filled that drive with more applications; not data, just applications. When WD announced they now had available a 300G 10k rpm Velociraptor the solution seemed simple and I acquired one.

Here’s the problem, the 300G Velociraptor is a 2.5″ 10k rpm drive that is mounted to an aluminum heat sink frame to adapt to the standard 3.5″ drive bays. But for some reason WD machined this heat sink where the SATA connections on the back end up shifted about an inch over from where they are on every other Sata drive

After 30 minutes on the phone with WD Customer service we both agreed that this drive is not compatible at all with a Mac Pro due to this problem. The WD customer tech did not find any info in their system about this problem either so it sounds as if WD is unaware as well. I have since found references to this problem on the net so its not just me.

But if you look on the cardboard box, there is the happy Mac logo proudly proclaiming compatibility.

[Western Digital] could fix this easily enough by changing their aluminum heat sink, but till they do… Hope this helps somebody else.

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Larry replies: Thanks, John, for sending this in.