Resolved WD Drive Manager for PPC

[B S Magnet]

This is probably more a request than a remark about the WD Drive Manager Utility for WD’s external kits.

I’ve owned and used a MyBook Studio II (the dual-drive model, ca. 2012, with FW800, USB 2.0, and eSATA connectivity). It's steady and reliable, and in the past I've configured it using the WD Drive Manager utility for Intel (specifically, from my Snow Leopard unibody MBP).

These days the drive is perma-connected to my G5 Server tower. I'm planning to add higher capacity disks for a larger hardware RAID 1. I’d like to handle this on my G5 and not have to dig out another FW cable to connect it with the MBP. Also, I know my G5 is perfectly capable of doing this, given the correct software.

There was a PPC edition of this WD Drive Manager Utility, which according to assorted digging is likely v2.25 (and probably the last Universal Binary they released). Unfortunately, WD have made it next to impossible (if not impossible) to track down this version. The current version, v3.10, is what one is re-directed to, even if trying to access older support/download page versions via Archive-dot-org.

Has anyone here utilized that PPC/UB version for their own drive setup needs, and if this happened recently, where were you able to find the installation dmg/zip?

 

[eyoungren]

Look here: https://www.driverguide.com/driver/detail.php?driverid=1811169

Don't get tripped up by the fact the site keeps referring to it as a 'driver'. It's this file: WDDriveManager2-25.zip which on my Quad G5 comes out to a WD Drive Manager Utility install app.

I checked the version and it shows as 2.05 so I don't know if that will work for you but the install app is working on my G5.

Hope that works out.

 

[B S Magnet]

Look here: https://www.driverguide.com/driver/detail.php?driverid=1811169

Don't get tripped up by the fact the site keeps referring to it as a 'driver'. It's this file: WDDriveManager2-25.zip which on my Quad G5 comes out to a WD Drive Manager Utility install app.

I checked the version and it shows as 2.05 so I don't know if that will work for you but the install app is working on my G5.

Hope that works out.

Outstanding! This was precisely what I'd been after for a while. Thank you! ::thumbs up::

 

[eyoungren]

Outstanding! This was precisely what I'd been after for a while. Thank you! ::thumbs up::

Cool! Glad I was able to help you out.

 

[B S Magnet]

Cool! Glad I was able to help you out.

I'm not sure how you ended up there, but I'm glad you were able to.

I kept striking out with both archived versions of the WDC site and third-party driver aggregation sites (most of which merely forwarded to WDC and, consequently, the current version).

I suppose it should be apparent why I'm upgrading capacity.



[Editing to show how the first thumbnail was also during full power, no-nap mode; the second is slowpoke-and-chill mode.]

 

[eyoungren]

I'm not sure how you ended up there, but I'm glad you were able to.

I've got a long set of years having to find my own stuff at work in order to do my job.

After a trip to the Internet Wayback Machine gave me no joy, I did a search for the version you mentioned. I came upon an erroneous page that was totally unrelated to what I was looking for. However, the search description yielded a filename.

When you search on Google, if you put what you are looking for inside quotes, then Google will search for that EXACT thing and not just the individual words. So a search for the filename in quotes thus yielded the solution.

There were some other hits I would have looked at if the first one didn't work, but it did so I didn't have to.

Some days it all works out, other days devs do such a great job of ridding the internet of their software it becomes a real PITA. Thankfully, that was not this day.

 

[B S Magnet]

As an endnote, should anyone else be searching to determine whether legacy WDC enclosure equipment like the MyBook series can accommodate upgrades to current drives:

Although the product manual and WDC's online lit insist that only WD Green drives are compatible, it is my understanding (and at least with the Blue series, now verified) that any matched pair of WD-made (i.e., WD disk firmware) SATA drives will likely work inside these enclosures — probably all the way up to (at present) the 15TB Ultrastar drives.

(This may even include WD's SSDs, though you may need a physical adapter/enclosure which mounts the 2.5" drive in a 3.5" housing.)

Mind you, you're likely on your own without WDC's support if you do this, but you should be OK. Probably the biggest considerations to factor when upgrading is verifying that disk power consumption is relatively comparable to the Green HDD series (e.g., ~0.6A at 5VDC or thereabouts) and able to stay cool (which could be a problem with the non-Intellidrive 7200+rpm models).

I'm adding this with highlight because I originally bought the MyBook Studio II with two 1TB Green drives in 2012. In 2014, I moved them to two 3TB Green drives (which was the largest HDD capacity WD sold inside that enclosure before discontinuing it for the Thunderbolt-ready MyBook Studio series). At the time, there was no documentation anywhere of going beyond the stated capacities. I wasn't ready to take the risk of buying higher-capacity drives only to learn there was some kind of firmware cap on crive capacity on the enclosure (which would be a jerky move by WDC).

Anyway, I’ve just installed two 4TB Blue series [WD40EZRZ] (to repurpose the 3TB disks for another task). The PPC version of WD Drive Manager v2.25 saw the drives just fine and configured them for RAID 1. (I did have to re-format the volume with Disk Utility to make it writable, as the WD Drive Manager initialized it as HFS+ read-only, but this wasn’t a big deal.)
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Some days it all works out, other days devs do such a great job of ridding the internet of their software it becomes a real PITA. Thankfully, that was not this day.

Fortuitous flukes are wonderful.

Semi-topical and relatable: I use Snow Leopard with a unibody 2011 13" i5 MBP. (That build is actually descended from a 2009 C2D unibody build of 10.6.8, originally 10.6.0.) With this setup, I'm pretty used to DIYing and tracking down stuff, especially in 2019. (The big one these days is finding current browsers, whose options nowadays are laggardly at best.)

While it has a backup partition with Sierra on it (used for pulling up Disk Util to repair the occasional node offset on the 10.6.8 startup volume), it has stayed with 10.6.8 and will stay with 10.6.8 for as long as the machine will run (due to older paripheral equipment with the last good software builds designed for SL).

I was, nevertheless, surprised when joining the MR forums to learn how there is not a dedicated Snow Leopard sub-forum, even as there are sub-forums for every subsequent version of OS X/macOS and, effectively, every version of OS X between 10.0 and 10.5 on this sub-forum).

 

[eyoungren]

I was, nevertheless, surprised when joining the MR forums to learn how there is not a dedicated Snow Leopard sub-forum, even as there are sub-forums for every subsequent version of OS X/macOS and, effectively, every version of OS X between 10.0 and 10.5 on this sub-forum).

I don't believe there is a large enough segment of the user base to warrant a section just for SL. Most of the people using SL are us PowerPC folk who happen to own early Intel models.

We have all taken it upon ourselves to answer questions dealing with early Intel Macs and software up to the early Unibody models, despite this forum being labeled only for PowerPC. Most, if not all of these have been abandoned for support by the larger Intel Mac forum here and as many of us own at least one type of these Macs it's just a natural progression.

If you have SL questions or early Intel hardware/software questions, just ask here.