How to open the Western Digital My Book (Studio) External drive case….
I’m considering upgrading it to a 2 Tb drive, and couldn’t find how to open it… The new Studio 2 drive looks excellent with it’s easy open, and customer supported drive swapping….
But the original isn’t documented, but this web page seems to cover the Studio model, and it seems pretty straight forward…
How to open the case and remove the hard drive from a Western Digital My Book exteranl enclosure
The system version is on the Installer disc, at:
/System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist
You can get the specific information with this command:
defaults read /path/to/mount/System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion ProductBuildVersion
While the above describes how to do it on media, you can also test your local hard drive. See below:
[nerv:/system/library/CoreServices] benjamin% defaults read /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion
{
ProductBuildVersion = 10F569;
ProductCopyright = "1983-2010 Apple Inc.";
ProductName = "Mac OS X";
ProductUserVisibleVersion = "10.6.4";
ProductVersion = "10.6.4";
}
For example:
9/4/10 1:48:31 PM KernelEventAgent[72] tid 00000000 received event(s) VQ_LOWDISK, VQ_VERYLOWDISK (516)
This indicates that Mac OS X has detected a drive (hard drive, RAM drive, Zip Drive, etc), that is very low or out of disk space. If this is your boot drive, you will receive a POP up warning message that the disk is out of disk space.
How to fix this? Free some disk space up from the drive in question, burn files to DVD, Delete unnecessary files or move them to a external drive.
After an unusually long wait, Apple has finally released updated models of its MacBook Pro line of notebooks. The 15′ and 17′ models offer the latest Core i5 and i7 processors, though the 13′ model still uses a Core 2 Duo processor. But new processors aren’t the only improvement; Apple has also seen fit to increase the base RAM configuration to 4GB on all models and bump the hard drive and SSD options. And Apple claims battery life has been improved, with some models now going as long as 10 hours without plugging in.
The new 13′ MacBook Pro offers 2.4GHz or 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo processors and 4GB of DDR3 RAM. The lower-end model gets a 250GB 5400RPM SATA drive, while the higher-end option comes with a 320GB 5400RPM drive. A 500GB 5400RPM hard drive is a build-to-order option, as are 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB solid state drives. Both models come with NVIDIA GeForce 320M integrated graphics, an update to the 9400M that previous MacBook Pros used. Combined with a 63.5WHr lithium polymer sealed battery, Apple claims these new 13′ MacBook Pro models can run up to 10 hours on a single charge.
Goody! A new VMware Fusion 3.1 Beta Now Available!!! Why am I excited? Well, I prefer Parallels, but for some reason Parallels doesn’t work on my Mac Pro. It complains that the hard drive is unavailable, and can’t be found.. Yet, if I make any configuration changes, it now magically works, until I reboot the computer… VMWare works fine, and never has a problem… It’s just slightly slower… Hopefully this will bring it up to par with Parallels…
This beta software includes 10+ new and improved features including:
via VMware: Team Fusion: VMware Fusion 3.1 Beta Now Available.
i added another hard disk on my computer, but when I opened My Computer the extra hard disk was not on there. What’s happening?
Chances are you added the hard drive correctly, but you haven’t finished installing it in Windows…It probably needs to be formatted.
This should solve your problem.
This assumes that the hard drive is physically intact. Put the drive into a 2.5″ enclosure and hook it up to another Mac.
sudo hdiutil attach /Volumes/UpInFlames/Users/user1/user1.sparsebundle
where UpInFlames is the volume name of your MacBook drive. You’ll need the password of the user2 as well as the password on the sparsebundle.
Then you should be able to access the data as normal.
Take this quote from Macworld:
When we connected the MacBook Pro to a 2TB Western Digital My Book Studio drive and copied a 1GB file to it from the internal hard drive, we found that it took 23 percent less time over FireWire 400 than over USB 2.0. Duplicating that file using FireWire 400 on the WD drive took 10 percent less time than when run over USB 2.0. To see how the different connections performed in more typical backup tasks, we copied over a 2.5GB folder containing 5000 individual files and folders. In that test, we found the FireWire 400 transfer to be 26 percent faster than USB 2.0. Using AJA’s System Test application, we found the MacBook Pro’s FireWire 400 connection to be 46 percent faster than USB in the writing tests. In the reading tests, however, the edge went to USB, which was nine percent faster than FireWire 400.
But this doesn’t make sense, does it?
USB 1, is primarily aimed at keyboards, joysticks, and other low speed transfers, after all, it is limited to 12 Mbit/s.
USB 2, upgrades the transfer rate to a peak of 480 Mbit/s, and is quite useful for large file transfers (eg, Hard Drives, Optical drives, etc…).
USB 3, is not yet finalized, and while on paper it will be significantly faster than USB 2, it is not yet ready for mainstream use.
Firewire 400, can transfer data at 100,l 200 or 400 Mbit/s half-duplex (12, 24, or 49 megabytes/second).
Firewire 800, allows a transfer rate of 786 Mbit/s full-duplex, and is backward compatible to Firewire 400.
In addition, there is a S1600, S3200, S800T, and (unreleased at this point) P1394d for the firewire family, each of these are significantly faster, but may require different cables (eg Fiber).
So why is Firewire 400 (400 Mbit/s) faster than USB (480 Mbit/s)?
Sadly, it is due to hardware limitations.
Overall, both USB and Firewire have a high rate of speed for data transfers, but Firewire currently has a slight edge. Will this difference in speed matter for most people, not necessarily, but for any time intensive data transfer Firewire will be faster. At least until USB 3 is released, and even then Firewire 1600 or 3200 would be faster, and they are already on the market…