just got myself a western digital my book pro 500gb external hard drive but however hard i try (searching the WD faqs/forums) i cannot get a definitive on whether the intelligent drive managment feature of turning on/off automatically to the behaviour of my macbook pro is applicable with a firewire 400/800 connection. i tried the hard disk on an USB connection and it does auto on/off but not with the firewire interfaces.

is there something wrong with my hard drive or is it one of those unmentioned glitches? i bought the hard drive for the firewire 800 interface and the auto on/off feature but it's very disappointing when the latter does not function as advertised. any one has experiences with the My Book range of hard drives and are able to offer a little perspective?

i tried dialling the Australian technical support line but it returned an unknown number. this is terribly frustrating as i have no idea why it doesn't work as it should.

Using FW400 on mine, and when I put MBP to sleep the drive also sleeps. Have found the drive to be awesome so far, maybe something is wrong with your interface, not sure. Which format have you got the drive in? I reformatted mine to HFS+ from the original FAT32. Can't see why that would make a difference though. Only thing that doesn't seem to work for me is how it said the light on the front would show a gauge of capacity, all it seems to do is flash and spin. :P

I have a few firewire WD 500GB mybooks.

They spin down after a while of inactivity (the blue light stays on) and they power off when I sleep or turn off my Macbook Pro.

I didn't get the drive capacity working (just spins) but I really don't care.

the HD is formatted to HFS+ journaled and the capacity gauge does work (though because of the outer ring light, it seems that the entire inner ring is illuminated as well).

but what does bug me is that the HD will only power off completely when connected to a USB interface but not on the firewire 400/800 ones. when i connect the HD on firewire 800 and turn the MBP off, it emits a pulse every 5 seconds... granted that the HD seems off as there are no audible activity when i put my ears near it but why is it able to power off completely on the usb connection and not on a firewire one? it's a little strange.

jerrah, did you install the WD button manager software that came along with the HD? it's meant to direct the capacity gauge feature but at least yours powers off along with your system and i'll glady take that anyday.

btw, thanks for the replies guys!!

I didn't install the software. I'm not fussed having the capacity lights.

mmm.. maybe i should just uninstall the software and maybe it'll work the same way as yours.

Sorry to drag up an old thread, but I was looking at getting one of the WD My Book Premium HDDs that have the FireWire 400 interface, but I haven't been able to find out whether it uses an Oxford 911 chipset and was hoping someone with one might be able to enlighten me?

TIA,

Nick