Firmware update and SATA II hard drive

@David Harbart: too late too late too late too late too late too late too late too late too late too late too late too late too late too late too late too late too late too late too late too late too late too late too late too late what do i do now what do i do now what do i do now what do i do now what do i do now what do i do now what do i do now what do i do now what do i do now what do i do now what do i do now what do i do now what do i do now

I've got a new 15" MBP that had the hard drive upgraded, installed EFI 1.7, and immediately the same problems everyone's been reporting here. Details aren't important.

Just calling a "me too" so that Apple might get a fix going. I hate having a brand new computer that's sitting on the shelf because I can't use it. What a bore.

This freaks me out. I've just ordered an MBP 15" with the 500Gb 7200RPM option. So if it arrives and it doesn't already have the 1.7 Firmware installed, would you suggest I do NOT install it yet? Perhaps wait for a 1.8 Firmware?

There would be no benefit to upgrading. Only SSDs "may" come close to saturating the bandwidth of SATA 1.5Gb. You would not likely see any benefit in upgrading your firmware with a hard drive. However, with an Apple installed drive, you would of course be covered in case of any problems. They can't give you the "we don't cover third party drives" line. I have a new MBP and I have just skipped the 1.7 firmware. The problems seem generally limited to user-installed drives. There have been a very few comments from people with Apple installed drives with problems... but it's hard to say if they were caused by the firmware update or if they are just the occasional actual failures that occur from time to time and they're just getting lumped into the same category. Since I don't see any benefit to upgrading the firmware... I don't want to chance it (even though my drive is the one that was shipped with my machine). After all... if something should happen, I don't have another drive to swap out.

Good point, and I agree, I'll hold off on the upgrade for the time being.

However, I was also hoping to purchase an OCZ Vertex 120GB SSD. I've been reading in the Apple and OCZ forums and finding many similar issues, some before and some after the 1.7 upgrade. It seems as though theres quite a list of potential issues with any third party drive, whether standard or SSD.

Probably best that I stick with the Apple-installed drive for the next few months until these glitches get ironed out.

Just wanted to add my voice to the chorus! I bought a 15.4" 2.53 Ghz Unibody MacBook Pro on June 13th. It worked fine, until the firmware upgrade and a hard drive swap. First, a WD 320Gb 5400 RPM, crazy beachballin...returned to retailer. Then a Seagate 320Gb 7200 RPM, wouldn't even install, crazy Input Output errors, file system not verified, etc., etc....in the mail, back to the online retailer. Now, a WD 320Gb 7200 RPM, a little better, but whenever another program is using the hard drive I get lots of beachballs. The file transfer speed is silly slow. Funny thing is, in between all of these drives I've been using the OEM Hitachi or a bootable backup on a WD 1TB external drive, they both work peachy.

Does anybody know if reinstalling from the restore disk reverts the firmware back to 1.6?

It doesn't :/

not only the new mbp has issues with fast drives. i have a late 2008 unibody mbp with latest firmware, latest mac os x version etc. and the combination of a corsair p256 and my unibody mbp with 2,8ghz and 4gb ram does not work. it freezes constantly for 30 secs after writing some data on it.

it has definately something to do with the crappy nvidia chipset, i have no problems in an old mbp 4,1 with intel chipset, ok it has only sata 1 but better sata 1 with full speed than sata 2 with no? speed

i predict that apple will switch back to a solid and "fast" intel chipset.

just my 5 cents

"Nvidia s...."

Same thing as everyone else for me :

- MBP 15.4 with 1.7 update did not work with 7K320 Hitachi drive, and SuperTalent UltraDrive ME 256 Gb. Went back for reparir as I did no know at the time that it was a firmware issue (altought I wondered, because stock 320 Gb drive worked)

- MBP 13.3 with 1.7 update had very little problems with the SSD drive. But it started being slower and slower and ... froze while unzipping files. Then it go around 3 mb/s write speed and was almost unusable. Reset PRAM and SMC but now the MBP starts to boot and hangs up. Doesn't want to boot on install DVD, or on a USB drive with the DVD image on a partition.

Reseting PMU, SMC, PRAM doesn't change anything : the machine seems to be dead. Does anyone have an idea how I could "revive" this machine ?

piceaadc

"i have a late 2008 unibody mbp with latest firmware, ..."

Are you saying you installed the, recent, 1.7 firmware update in question?

Just got off the phone with Jerry at Apple Support, I'm perfectly willing to settle for a reversion back to EFI 1.6. He's sending the issue over to the MacBook Pro engineers to see if this is even possible, or if there's any other fix for this issue. Thankfully, I didn't get any of that "third party drives are not supported" junk (not yet anyway). I'll keep you all posted, he said he get back to me in 2 or 3 days. He said he hasn't heard of this issue...

Has anyone tried to do a Repair Disk in Disk Utilities. It fixed something about "boot permissions" on mine and it has been good ever since.

I ordered the 500GB Scorpio and a 4GB memory this week for my MBP 13.3, but since I got the EFI update, I think I'll do the memory upgrade and leave the Scorpio in the box till Apple can fix the issue. I've only had my MBP for a week so I'll try to call the campus Apple Store tomorrow and address this, and see if they'll just exchange it. But since I had to wait four days for them to get a shipment of MBP's I may be out of luck; either that or the kids minding the store won't know what I'm talking about

Guys,

The only way this will get resolved is to call Apple support, go through the troubleshooting and then let them escalate this to Engineering Support. Only if the escation reaches engineering support in large numbers action will be taken.

Also refer to this thread, as 150 confirmed users with the issue and over 25000 reads obviously show that this is not "an unknown problem".

I will send some mails to Industry websites too to see if they want to pick up on this issue to increase the visibility.

Ollie.

So last night I took my 5 day old 15" 2.53 MBP in to the Apple store to attempt a return. Because it was opened they were unwilling to take it back without an additional $160 out of my pocket. I tried to explain the reason and the people behind the Genious Bar immediately knew of the issue. They steadfastly took the stance that Apple told us that these hard drives were unsupported and that I should have known better. Three different employees told me that "Apple hasn't shipped a computer with a 3Gb/s hard drive and therefore will not support their use" I explained again and again that they do in fact ship the MBP with the Seagate 7200rpm 16mb Cache ST9500420AS as a built to order option. At that point it was like I was talking to a drone. There was now a lot of huddling in the back room where I couldn't hear them.
In the end they are unwilling to help me out. Each of them is "Certain" that Apple will not release a fix because there isn't an issue as long as you don't upgrade your hard drive. My options are to pay $160 to return a machine that I now have no interest in because I can't upgrade the hard drive or to keep it with the slow and small drive they sold it with. I understand it's not the fault or decision of the Genious that worked with me. I post this so potential buyers can be forewarned of this issue and for those already experiencing the issue to brace themselves for a lack of support and a whole lot of "deaf ears" if they approach Apple.

Message was edited by: jettisoned