MyBook Mirror Edition 2 Tb won't stop searching
by Bimmicus - 3/25/10 12:38 PM
I've only had this drive for a few weeks, but I've noticed a tendency for the thing to always be running even when there's nothing for it to do. The head will click and gronk around continuously, the status light cycling over and over again. This generates a fair amount of heat in the drive after a while, and I imagine it'll wear down a lot faster if this keeps up.
I've tried several different approaches to solve this, including many wipes and reloads. At its worst, the drive would grind away even if the computer was asleep or the drive disconnected from the computer. A few times this happened immediately following a reformat on a supposedly "erased" (but not zeroed) disk. Nothing seemed to solve it.
Western Digital recommended that I try plugging it into a different outlet, which I did. This has calmed it down somewhat, but the problem mostly persists, and I continue to get frequent "drive in use" errors when I attempt to eject the disk, even though as far as I can tell nothing is using it.
One odd note: earlier today as it was chugging away, I quit the one program open besides the Finder (DragThing), and the churning immediately ceased. It's quiet for now, even after reopening DragThing, but I'm just waiting for something to get it all riled up again.
I've observed this behavior on a Power Mac G5 running 10.5.8 and a March 2009 Core Duo iMac with 10.6.2. I'd really rather not ship it back to WD just yet, so any insights into this weird problem would be appreciated.

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