Studio II Edition Mac and software

WD External and Portable SSD External SSD for macOS
1

I have had an enormous amount of problems in Mac OS X Snow Leopard; sluggish perfofmance, instability etc having installed the Studio II Edition Mac and the WD Manager / RAID configuration software that came with the installation process.  

I couldn’t resolve these issues, because I wasn’t able to find the cause of problems for weeks.

Today, I mentioned these problems to my friend, who happened to know I have an external FW hard disk drive. He asked, if it’s from WD. and if I’ve been stupid enough to follow installation instructions. Yes, guilty as charged.

So I checked my /var/log/system.log and found these:

Oct 13 19:50:19 tero-lehtos-mac-mini 

             WDDriveManagerStatusMenu[211]: *** attempt to pop an unknown 

             autorelease pool (0x102da00)

Oct 13 19:50:19 tero-lehtos-mac-mini              WDDriveManagerStatusMenu[211]: *** attempt to pop an unknown              autorelease pool (0x102da00)

I had already before got error messages from the WD Manager, but in Finder it still worked fine, so I didn’t suspect anything.

So my question would be, why does WD ship software with a supposedly Mac compatible device that causes severe instability issues? I uninstalled this software and everything has worked better after that. It even feels like my OS X has become faster again.

Solution: I downloaded the WD Drive Manager again (  http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=111&sid=61&lang=en ) and chose “Remove”. Voilá, problems seem to have disappeared.

What a waste of time because of buggy software.

edit: typos

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That’s because the Drive Manager is --NOT-- listed as fully compatible with 10.6, as shown in their downloads section: http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=114&sid=61&lang=en

It seems that WD has not released an update for that tool in almost 2 years, which means that the issue is that it’s just not compatible with your newer OS. But if I were on your situation on a Mac that runs 10.5 or 10.4, I think I’d call WD for help, because as far as I know and please correct me if I’m wrong, that tool is needed to change the RAID on the Studio II. 

However, since they state that the Studio II is not supported on 10.6 at the end of this link  http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=621 , then well… I would not expect an update as this is the last living unit of previous drives (The MyBook World just got kicked out by the MyBook Live). Then again, WD may release an update or a new Studio II (Who knows).

I hope it helps!!