I’ve used a Western Digital ‘My Book’ 250GB external drive for a good while now. Connected to my Mac Book Pro, it takes a bootable clone backup of my hard drive each night plus houses my 60GB iTunes library. It’s been no problem at all.
Recently I’ve noticed iTunes freezing up plus the Finder becoming completely inaccessible, even after a forced relaunch. It didn’t take long to figure out that simply unplugging the Firewire cable to the hard drive solved the issue (albeit with scary warnings about unplugging the drive without ejecting properly first).
So, something amiss with the My Book drive. At first, I presumed the thing was dying (as all hard drives eventually do) but a cursory Google search uncovered lots and lots of folks experiencing the same problem.
Long story short: it’s down to the Button Manager software that’s installed with the drive. Apparently it’s buggy and causes this very issue, but as I hadn’t until now even realised there was a Button Manager it was probably safe to uninstall.
So uninstall I did, and I’m pleased to report that all the problems are over (and in fact my whole machine, from bootup and beyond) is now zippier than ever! Yipee!!
Open up the Terminal and type:
sudo /usr/bin/uninstall-WDButtonManager
Put in your admin password, and the job is indeed a good ‘un.
Oddly, the 500GB model I have attached to the Mac Mini in the living room is fine.
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