"I've been a fan for many years and rely on your site updates... I have been one of the lucky ones to receive one of the very first 27" iMac i7 Quad Core that shipped. It arrived on the 18th Nov 2009 and have had NO issues what so ever with it. It's my primary work horse and is up 24/7. Possibly the best Mac I've ever owned (my first was a Apple II) and much quieter that my last Mac Pro that now has become my central media server. Anyway I digress....

When I saw the graphics firmware update I was skeptical about installing it as I have had no flickering or tearing graphic issue, under OS X 10.6.2 or Win 7 (Boot Camp 3 - ATI drivers_catalyst 9.12 Suite). (BTW - there was a 'hotfix' for that update IIRC, but I can't recall the details now.-Mike)
It's been 8 hours since I took the plunge and installed the update, quick, simple and no issues whatsoever. ROM and EFI version have been updated. See below.
Cheers and Happy Holidays, WA Australia
-William

(ASP info clipped to just list before/after versions)
BEFORE FIRMWARE UPDATE:
ATI Radeon HD 4850:
ROM Revision: 113-B9110C-394
EFI Driver Version: 01.00.367

AFTER FIRMWARE UPDATE:
ROM Revision: 113-B9110C-425
EFI Driver Version: 01.00.383"

I don't know the (before/after) ATI 4670 versions - the EFI driver might be the same though. (If anyone does send a note.) Before the graphics firmware update was released I'd heard a rumor about an LVDS cable being the cause of some new iMac display problems (and delays on new shipments) - but no idea if that's true.
If it was a GPU/vram corruption issue, then an external Display (or screenshot) should show that also. See Wednesdays (Dec 23rd) news page for notes on that (no issues w/external display).

And BTW - every time there's a graphics firmware update some question if there's been any change to clock rates and performance. I suspect this update is just bug fixes, but have asked about that as well.

First reply to this post is from someone using these drives in a NAS:

"I have two Seagate 2TB LP drives installed in my Netgear ReadyNAS Duo, without experiencing any issues at all. They are in use as a network media server plus destination for my Time Machine backups for 3 Macs (two mini's and a MacBook). No clicks, whirs, stutters, etc. although that may be because they're not in a Mac and are therefore formatted differently (I believe the ReadyNAS Duo is a Linux box).
-Steve"

BTW - I don't think the format/OS is a factor, as I later did see some posts from owners of this drive (not just mac users) on the clicking problem. (And at least one owner reporting a drive failure after little use, but not sure how common failures are as a certain % of any drive will have infant failures.) However this does bring back memories of the past history of seagate drive/firmware problems especially on early shipments of new models. (And the last episode of this was by far the worst.)

"I'm the chief tech guy at a company that writes music for commercials. We have offices in NY, LA, London, and Paris, so I manage many Macs and Mac servers. For our main servers we have been using High Point Rocket RAID 3522 SATA RAID cards, supporting 8 drives. These are some of the only affordable cards that I have found that support RAID 6 - you can lose up to two drives with no data loss. High Point' support is less than stellar, but the cards have been working fine for over two years with arrays containing a mix of Hitachi and Samsung 750 GB SATA drives. One card died about a year ago, and I was sent a replacement by my vendor (Granite Digital, who I do recommend for their support).

A few weeks ago I decided to upgrade my arrays. I shopped around and found Western Digital "Green Caviar" 1.5 TB drives (model WD15EADS) for a great price ($110 each). I ordered 30 of them. Then the nightmares began.

Frequent crashing, kernel panics, channels not being recognized - that's channels, not the drives themselves. No amount of swapping cables would change it once the channel would disappear. I got another 3522 card thinking that was the problem. I finally got one to work, but the rebuild was so slow it did not finish in the week that I spent trying to get them to work. The crashes caused data loss, and were the result of the 3522 and simply "disappearing" - that is, the system suddenly did not know they were installed. (drive spinning down/going to sleep?-Mike) Once the array was "up" (although not fully initialized, which was going on in the background), performance was dreadful. It took 1 hour to copy 10 GB of data from an internal drive to the aray (The servers are 4 core Mac pro 2.66 ghz, not xserves).
HighPoint support was not able to help me solve this, I finally called Western Digital. They told me that these drives are not suitable for RAID arrays due to something called "deep recovery mode". WD refused to exchange them. There is no warning of any kind on the labels. On the other hand, the on line vendor (in this case not Granite Digital, unfortunately) will take them back, but for a restocking fee - since I bought 30 of them, that is somewhat of a relief. However, I don't know why they would charge a restocking fee for some drives I haven't even unpacked yet.

WD says they should work as internal drives in Macs, (Did you try them as single drives w/onboard SATA???-Mike) but performance seems to be very poor in that case also. WD also says that there is a Green Caviar drive that is supposed to be suitable for arrays, but I can't find any for sale anywhere. (??? Green drive for RAID?) In any case, I will not buy from them again.
Thanks for hearing out my rant. I would be very wary of buying these drives for any use at all.
(I asked what OS X version (server?) he used. Also asked for the drive firmware version but it may be too late for that. (ASP will report it, but not sure if it's on the drive label.) Other owners noted v01.00A01. And since these drives are NOT a good choice for a RAID array - have you tried them in single drive use?-Mike)
Tried it on OS X 10.6.2 client, and 10.5.8 server, and 10.4.11 server.
(he later wrote)
Also, WD tells me that they have something called "deep recovery mode". If the drive detects an error, it can stop being accessible for up to two minutes while the drive tries to repair itself. It seems to me that that would bring just about ANY system to it's knees. Mac OS X is not so forgiving - I have seen the system crash when a firewire drive "stalls". I'm not an expert but it just seems like a weird thing for them to do.

(It would be interesting to know what if any Console messages (error messages, etc.) were shown when the drive(s) act up. And although SMART attributes are far from standardized in some cases (long story mentioned before here in the article on notebook drive load cycle counts), I wonder what something like Smart Utility for OS X would show as far as any drive errors, etc. IF you try them (after reformat) as single drives and still see a problem (w/onboard SATA - NOT RR card) let me know. If you see problems as a SINGLE drive (w/onboard SATA) then although rare, there's always the chance of a bad batch/lot of drives. Most owners of these drives (of course not bought for RAID) have not had any problems.-Mike)
The drives were in an array, so the OS has no direct access to them. But the array card (rocket raid 3522) reports smart status and events such as bad sector, etc. In my case it did not report any problems at all, but still crashed frequently.

Now I am thinking the crashing might have been caused by other factors, but since WD told me specifically that the drives will NOT work with arrays, I am returning them anyway. And read and write speeds were very poor. When I went back to my old array of 750 GB drives, read/write times went back up to 40-60 mb/s I think.
-Jim W."

That still seems VERY low if those are the actual rates, but from his later mails it sounds like his server has other problems as well. (I've seen even older single drives do better than that, although no idea how full his drives were or what he used for a benchmark.)
I've never owned a WD 1.5GB Green drive but I have used a WD 1TB "Green" (2nd gen/3 platter/32MB cache model) in my Ministack external drive since fall 2008 w/o any problems. (And even as a GP drive, it's nearly as fast as the FW800 interface it's used with.) As I mentioned back then, I chose that drive because I wanted a cool running one in that compact case. (I'd had a 1st gen 1TB (5 platter) drive in there for about a year and it was one of the hotter running models which caused the ministack fan to frequently run.) For ministack use, I've been very satisfied with the WD 1TB GP. (Oliver had noted better than expected performance of the 1st gen (4 platter/16mb cache) WD 1TB Green in his Mac Pro review of 1TB drives in early 2008 (single drive tests) but again that's a different drive and different application/usage.)
And I also have a 1TB "Caviar Black" (7200rpm) which of course is much faster than the Green drive, but I no complaints with either of them as I bought each for a different purpose/enclosure. I never owned any of the WD Enterprise or RE series though.
FYI/Update: A reader reply to this post:

"Re: RAIDed WD15EADS drives...
I had bought two of them last month (also at a great price - much better per GB than any reputable 2GB drives I could find) to increase the capacity of our mirrored RAID that acts as our home server's TimeMachine (rather a belt + suspenders approach but we've had a backup drive die tragically at work so mirroring seemed like a decent safety net).

So far, in this low-throughput situation we have not had any problems, but I'm touching wood as I say that just in case...

2 x WD15EADS-00P8B0

2 x OWC Mercury Elite SATA enclosures

PowerMac G5 2x2 1st generation

OWC Initio,INIC1623 SATA card
(Just for the record I asked what firmware the drives had (Apple system profiler reports this as the drive "revision"). I couldn't find that OWC SATA card so asked if he had a link.-Mike)
It's probably the Firmtek card if I recall correctly. It was the only one that was bootable. Or maybe it was the in-house brand... Here it is. It's no longer available: http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/SATAPCI2P/
OS & drive info as previously requested:
MacOS 10.5.8
Model: WDC WD15EADS-00P8B0
Revision: 01.00A01
-Jim M."

BTW - Wednesday morning I recd another report on this drive from a Mac Pro owner using it internally (bay2/onboard SATA) saying he's had no problems with it in a couple months use, partitioned as a Time Machine backup, Render HD for FCP and general storage. Personally unless there was a bad batch of them or some new (flawed) firmware update (never got any of that info from him), I don't know of any issues with these drives when used logically (i.e. single drive, where a lower power/cooler running drive was the primary focus, not high performance).

• Final Cut Studio (2009): FAQ
• Aperture 2.1.4: Some exported or printed images may show color shift on Mac OS X v10.6 (fixed in 10.6.2)
• Mac OS X v10.5: Unable to send faxes while modem is set to receive faxes
• OS X Server v10.6: Mail.log contains encryption warnings after upgrading
• OS X Server v10.6: LDAP binding issues after migration
• Xsan 2, 2.1: Computer may appear more than once in a volume failover priority sheet
• OS X Server version 10.5: Evaluating performance
• Transferring information from your current iPhone to a new iPhone
• iPhone: Troubleshooting Internet tethering
• How to enable Entourage syncing to iPhone and iPod touch
• iPhone and iPod touch: Gmail account will not connect to Gmail server
• MobileMe: Syncing data between Outlook or Windows Contacts and MobileMe Contacts may result in some fields missing

• Parallels Desktop 5: Bug fixes make the difference (ref: yesterday's update)
• Report: Disney and CBS Interested in Apple TV Plans
• Tapulous: We Make $1 Million a Month from App Store
• iTunes Connect Adds New App Search Capability - Devs get improved method to track their apps
• Apple Wins Patents for iDVD, a Universal USB Connector, More
• Hack Lets You Use a Bluetooth Keyboard With Your iPhone (using iPhone Bluetooth Keyboard Driver)
• Epic Demonstrates Unreal Engine 3 for the iPod Touch/iPhone 3GS
  
  Misc. Software/App Updates:
• Snow Leopard Cache Cleaner 5.0.4
• Perian 1.2 (late posting this)
• Stairways Software releases Keyboard Maestro 4.0.1
• Freeverse Thor game intro price - 99 cents (apps store link)
• ActionSoft Releases Insectoid 1.0.2 (bugfixes)
• QuakeLive Holiday Cheer Update (see change list)
  
  Other/Misc:
• Intel Core i7 D0 (stepping) Core Performance Advantage Revealed
• ARMA II 1.05 update (bugfixes, new content, removes DRM)
• (Another) Team Fortress 2 Update
• Broadcom, Nvidia bring HD video to new Netbooks
• The 5 most welcome digital audio products of 2009