Firmware update and SATA II hard drive

Thanks Alec Gold, I figured that was the case. Everybody should continue to keep at Apple over this issue and hopefully we'll see some kind of fix soon, even if it is a drop back to 1.5gbps just to get everyone going again.

I purchased a Seagate 500Gb 16Mb Cache Drive yesterday and spent several hours attempting to get it to work. I first replaced the stock Hitachi 250Gb SATA drive with the new ST905003N3A1AS and the brand new 2 day old Macbook Pro completed about 10-15% of the format and then failed to format any further. Multiple further attempts would fail immediately. I tried to reboot the machine and at that point it would not boot at all....not even to an external drive nor from DVD/CD. I returned to the original drive and mounted the new 500Gb drive via an external USB adapter (CoolGear SATA to USB adapter) and was able to reformat the drive after several attempts. I then swapped it back into the MBP and attempted to install OSX to it. This quickly failed as well and the drive became inaccessible once again. At this point I thought I had reason to suspect there was an issue with the new Hard Drive. I returned it to the store and got a replacement (same model). I've tried everything and there's no way to get this drive to function whatsoever in my new 15" unibody MacBook Pro. I've even gone so far as to clone the stock drive with a fresh install of OSX but the machine will not sucessfully boot with the drive mounted via the internal SATA controller. So after more than 40 hours of attempted installs I found this thread which could have saved me a days worth of wasted time but Apple is still pushing this garbage on to the masses. I'm not a happy camper and it makes me want to hurt someone with a dull spoon. I scheduled an appointment tomorrow where I will return my "what-could-have-been-a-great-computer" 15" MBP for some other computer that actually works but I promise to leave my spoons at home.

Goldie in Portland OR

I have a optical bay tray similar to the optibay products. I bought it to run my g.skill ssd's in raid 0 mode. I had a my laptop sent back to apple because it kept falling to sleep at random times and it was determined to be a hardware issue. The new laptop they sent me had the new efi (1.7). My g.skill ssd's are no longer able to function in raid 0 mode. In addition the ssd's run super slow in the optical bay sata tray. The apple stock hard drive seems to function fine in the optical bay tray though. But it seems that I cannot of have a sata 2 device installed via the super drive sata cable.

This upsets me as I bought this laptop to better take advantage of my ssd raid0 which functioned fine in my alu MBP. And it upsets me further that it worked fantastically until the firmware update. And upsets me most because my laptop, the 17" umbp did not need the firmware at all.

Apple, please be better then this and allow me to downgrade my efi to 1.6!!!!!!

What we need is not going back to FW 1.6, but a FW 1.8 that will fix all the mess that 1.7 had made!
Come on apple, you've already listened to us once, so listen to us again, we need a fix for this problem badly!

Message was edited by: assisterah

I picked up my new 2.66 Macbook pro yesterday & replaced the hard drive with a NEW Hitachi 320GB 7,200 SATA 11, formated to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) installed OS & iLife then updated (lots'a updates for a minute old Mac). The updates required a restart which in turn meant Firmware update had to be quit. Long story short all fired up well read Apple install info for this update & went ahead. All went as described, load bar completed & now it's stuck on the apple loading screen. It's been running all day like this as I tried to find out what I'm supposed to do now.

Please HELP. Does anybody know what I should be doing now, besides contacting what appears to be un-contactable Apple support ??

Well, so we can add the NEW Hitachi 320 (whatmodelnumberever) to the list of non supported HDD after the Firmware upgrade.

@iBdb: You can use your HDD which came with the MBP or you wait with all of us untill apple fix this!

YOU HEAR, APPLE?!?!

I have the 15,4" 2,53GHz 4GB RAM model and installed a WD5000BEVT drive and i also had these problems after the firmware update.
So sorry to inform you that the 2,53 model is also affected...

Oh btw: When i called Apple about this issue the techguy told to do a PRAM reset and a SMC reset.

Of course this didn't help much...

I am running the PQI S525 64GB in the mid 2009 MBP 13" 2.26G with 2GB ram, also I have updated to the latest firmware 1.7

It has been running fine since last night, will post some ss later tonight.

do not install do not install do not install do not install do not install do not install do not install do not install do not install do not install do not install do not install do not install do not install do not install do not install do not install etc.....

but... why not? why not? why not? why not? why not? why not? why not? why not? why not? why not? why not? why not? why not? why not? why not? why not? why not? why not? why not? why not? why not? why not? why not? why not? why not? why not? why not? why not? why not? why not? why not? why not? why not? why not? why not? why not? why not? LOL!!!

Just follow up with ss, and it has been running for 22hours without any problem.

http://files.getdropbox.com/u/266708/PQI%20S525%2064GB%20SSD%202.jpg
http://files.getdropbox.com/u/266708/PQI%20S525%2064GB%20SSD%201.jpg

As this update has not been pulled http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/firmware_hardware/

I think that apple is not going to do anything about it!! Looks like I will be sending my MBP for repair!!!!

I'm getting a bad sunburn having spent so much time at the beach! I'll wait until the end of the week to see if a solution is reached (in the form of an EFI update or hardware replacement if necessary), or I'm afraid I'll have to return this otherwise great machine and replace it with something that can handle the Intel SSD...

I bought two 15" MacBook Pro two weeks ago; One 3,06 GHz BTO with a 500 GB HDD with 7.200 rpm and one 2,53 GHz BTO with a 500 GB HDD with 5.400 rpm. Directly after setup I installed all updates including the 1.7 Firmware update on both machines. The BTO 7.200 hard drive is a Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB (ST9500420ASG). The BTO 5.400 drive is a Hitachi Travelstar.

The MBP with the 5.400 drive works fine. The one with the 7.200 drive has the following problems:
a) beachball every 20-30 minutes without any processor activity when using a hard disk intensive programm like faces in iPhoto
b) slow hard disk performance when copying files from and to the internal disk

I compared the MBPs with Xbench and real live tests and found out that the 7.200 drive is about 50% SLOWER than the 5.400 drive when just copying some files (35,000 files with 4,5 GB in total) to and from the hard drive. According to http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/mobile-hdd-notebook,2305-12.html the Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB should be significant FASTER. The Disk test in Xbench reports a 46.34 score for the Seagate Momentus 7200.4

Has anybody the same performance issues?

I also have an old (March 2006) MBP with 2,16 GHz with a Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB (ST9500420AS) - without the G-Force option and this MPB copies files faster than the new one with the 7200 drive but slower than the new MPB with the 5400 drive.

Is anybody experiencing the same performance problem after the firmware update or has the MPB a general problem with faster disks? What scores do you get with your 7200 rpm disks?

Does anybody know another/better tool to measure hard drive performance?