I was very happy with my Western Digital Studio II Drive so I bought a second one. This new one has been giving me trouble since I got it. For starters, it always shows the temperature condition as “Warm”. The drive is regularly missing from my desktop as it just shuts itself off. I figured I had a bad drive. I went on the WDC website and found the RMA process to be extremely pleasant. My replacement arrived today. I plugged it in and it immediately shows the temperature condition as “Hot”.
I thought it might have something to do with the order on the Firewire chain. I changed the order of the drives but there was no change. I unplugged the drive from Firewire and plugged it into the USB port. The temperature status on the drive changed from Hot to Warm — but still not “OK”.
I changed the order in which the drives are connected to my system. Sure enough. The first drive is always OK. The second drive is always Warm. And the third drive plugged in is always Hot.
So at this point I chalk it up to yet another problem with the WD Drive Manager software. This hurts my already low opinion of this software.
I plan to call WD tech support in the morning so see what they have to say.
I called WD tech support. They were not much help. They referred me to call California on Monday. I ended up on their web site and found two downloads that looked promising. The first was an updated version of the WD Drive Manager software. I don’t really like this software but it is the only way to configure a RAID 1 with this drive. The two internal drives are not exposed to the OS. I was using version 2.13. Version 2.25 was available. I downloaded it and suddenly all my drives are OK.
The second download was a firmware update. It only works over USB and requires that you uninstall the WD Drive Manager software. That’s going to be a trick since the WD Drive Manager is not a full application and does not have an uninstaller. My solution is to plug the drive into a second computer and use the firmware updater on it. The newest firmware is 1.02 from September 2008. I do not see anyway of seeing my current firmware. That information does not appear in the RAID Manager “Info” screen.