WD My Book OK?

[audiovideo]

Hi,

This drive is an attractive deal, and we've been happy with it. However, below I've pasted "Answer ID:1474" from Western Digital Support FAQs, and I can confirm five things:

1. The "My Book Premium Edition II Triple Interface 1TB" drive will NOT work as a boot drive for PPC--in my case an iMac with iSight--and apparently no fix is available. WD indicates it's a problem with how "the first SCSI LUN" (huh?) is used during boot.

2. However, it works great with my Intel MacBook Pro--IF I hold down the option key while booting, then select the external firewire drive.

3. It takes a long time to boot the first time you do this, but thereafter is speedy. (We're using firewire 800)

4. It's a very quiet drive until the fans kick-in, and then it's pretty loud. The fans kick-in only when the drive is working hard (like during a SuperDuper! Clone). It appears to be a great drive for cloning Intel Macs--it has two 500 MB drives in it, and we're running it as a 500 MB with a 500 MB mirror (RAID1) in three partitions.

5. The boot problem is apparently not related to APM or GUID issues--as described below.

I hope this info is of some use--we just purchased two licenses of SuperDuper! and couldn't be happier.

Regards,

audiovideo

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Problem:
The WD My Book Premium II or Pro II hard drive will not function as a boot drive when connected by FireWire (1394a and 1394b) to PPC based Apple computer. The WD My Book Premium II and Pro II will boot under Intel based Apple computers when the Operating System is installed from installation disks.

Cause:
This is caused because the Apple ROM code and Open Boot architecture check for the first SCSI LUN to boot from. The WD My Book Premium II and Pro II architectural design uses the first SCSI LUN as the "communication" port to talk with the firmware of the drive.

Resolution:
There is currently no resolution to this issue.
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http://support.wdc.com/?p_sid=FYlbSzIi