i had already used minitool partition wizard to overwrite the drive with zeros with the drive connected by a usb to sata adapter.  would that have accomplished the same thing? ... View more

i updated the firmware from mu02 to mu05. had to clone a windows install to this drive in order to update the firmware. storage executive won't allow updating this drive over usb to sata.   i've beed doing quite a bit of testing on the drive. i used h2testw to fill the drive with test data and then verify that data. so far so good with the drive formatted to exFAT. i tried with NTFS and had some issues. maybe because the drive is connected via a usb to sata bridge during testing and h2testw was really designed for usb flash drives and memory cards.   here's SMART info on MU02:           here's SMART info on MU05:           ... View more

thanks for the reply.   one strange thing i noticed, if i cold boot the imac 9,1 from the power button, the link speed will be set to SATA I but if i then restart the imac from within OSX, the sata link speed gets set to SATA II. this seems to happen every time (it's repeatable). as long as no data is lost or corrupted, i could probably live with this. ... View more