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IanBurrell Author

Level 1

0 points

Firmware update and SATA II hard drive

Has anybody had any problems with new MacBook Pro after yesterday's firmware update with third party hard drive? I got a MacBook Pro 13" recently, swapped the 320 GB hard drive from my old MacBook. After reinstalling the OS for new hardware drivers, everything was working fine.

After the firmware update yesterday, the machine has started freezing randomly; the spinner comes up sometimes when reading or writing to the drive. The hard drive, a WD Scorpio Blue, supports SATA II. My suspicion is that there are intermittent data errors when using the SATA 3 Gbps interface. It could be an incompatibility between the controller and drive or the ribbon cable isn't good enough for newer SATA.

Does anybody know of a way to force the drive or the controller to use SATA 1.5 Gbps? Can I revert to the old firmware?

MacBook Pro 13", Mac OS X (10.5.7)

Posted on Jun 23, 2009 10:08 AM

1,980 replies

coop0129

Level 1

10 points

Jun 25, 2009 7:34 AM in response to solsun

I'm not sure, but it is still going strong with NO problems whatsoever. I have been using the computer all morning. About 2 hours so far. No issues at all.

guykuo

Level 1

44 points

Jun 25, 2009 8:07 AM in response to coop0129

"I wonder if your lack of issues is due to the fact that you did the firmware update BEFORE upgrading the drive? "

On my MBP13, I upgraded the drive BEFORE applying the update. In fact, the Seagate Momentus was the boot drive during the EFI update. No problems here. It will be very interesting to learn what the underlying problem turns out to be.

iain_nl

Level 1

0 points

Jun 25, 2009 8:37 AM in response to guykuo

Deleting all the partitions in Ubuntu didn't work. Did some benchmarks on a Windows 7 machine as well, no problem detected whatsoever to the drive. Trying to install OSX again on it, but still as slow as ever.

Mini-Mac

Level 3

819 points

Jun 25, 2009 8:40 AM in response to iain_nl

For me I installed the 500 GB HD on June 10 and the firmware update on June 23rd.

Xuyen

Level 1

5 points

Jun 25, 2009 8:48 AM in response to IanBurrell

Well I can confirm that doing the firmware update first before replacing the hard drive would not make a difference as I upgraded the firmware while on the Hitachi 250 OEM drive. I replaced my drive yesterday with a WD Scorpio 500 and installed clean copy of Leopard. I have the problem. There seems to not be any pattern on why some people are posting that theirs is fine while majority of ours experience the issue.

solsun

Level 3

533 points

Jun 25, 2009 8:59 AM in response to Xuyen

Can anyone answer if it is okay to replace the drive and NOT do the firmware update?

Since I won't be using SSD, I'd just assume pass on the firmware until it gets sorted out, but I do want to install the 7200 RPM Seagate.. Will it function properly without doing the firmware update?

JoeyR

Level 6

8,305 points

Jun 25, 2009 9:07 AM in response to solsun

The drive will function fine without the update. Problems have only been reported since the firmware update. There have not been any reported issues of problems with HDD upgrades prior to the update.

solsun

Level 3

533 points

Jun 25, 2009 9:14 AM in response to JoeyR

Thanks.

efenska

Level 1

5 points

Jun 25, 2009 9:47 AM in response to solsun

I had been holding off doing anything with my new MBP, 500GB drive and 4GB of memory, but I finally went ahead and broke the seals and gave it a shot. Before I ever booted the MBP, I swapped in the new drive and memory. Booted up off the DVD, formatted the drive, installed OS X and when the new software alert started jumping on the dock, I scanned the details and deleted the EFI 1.7 update.

I am up and running without issue, albeit at 1.5Gb speed, but I will be real careful about ANY updates that I install in the future. I'll wait a week or two and Google for problems before I install any update.

vudep

Level 1

0 points

Jun 25, 2009 9:50 AM in response to IanBurrell

Im experiencing the same problems with my ssd Samsung 256GB and macbook pro 13". This is really frustrating 😟

solsun

Level 3

533 points

Jun 25, 2009 10:02 AM in response to efenska

efenska wrote:

I am up and running without issue, albeit at 1.5Gb speed,

But a standard HD even at 7200 RPM is not capable of surpassing the 1.5GB barrier anyway, so there is really no advantage to doing the firmware update anyway... Correct?

nizmoz

Level 1

4 points

Jun 25, 2009 10:06 AM in response to Xuyen

Mine is doing exactly the same thing. Worked fine before replacing the HD with the new Firmware. I had my 500GB waiting to go in once I got a T6. Just put it in last night, it took 7 hours to do a restore from time machine, and I went in and it kept locking up. I was like what is going on. So I decided to wipe it and reinstall Leopard. It's taking 9 hours to install. Uggg! Going to put the oem HD back in for now till Apple resolves this issue.

efenska

Level 1

5 points

Jun 25, 2009 10:28 AM in response to solsun

I don't know the exact numbers, but supposedly a physical hard disk cannot reach 1.5Gb/sec, so NOT upgrading the firmware is only an issue if you plan on going with an SSD.

JoeyR

Level 6

8,305 points

Jun 25, 2009 10:33 AM in response to IanBurrell

Actually... at this point, I would say not upgrading the firmware would be preferable. You won't see any performance improvement with a HDD... and you risk running into the problems that others have posted here.

y_p_w

Level 6

17,696 points

Jun 25, 2009 10:47 AM in response to efenska

efenska wrote:
I don't know the exact numbers, but supposedly a physical hard disk cannot reach 1.5Gb/sec, so NOT upgrading the firmware is only an issue if you plan on going with an SSD.

That's for sustained transfers after the data buffer is maxed out. However - communications between the host and data buffer (before final mechanical write to the disk) can easily communicate at more than 1.5 Gbit/sec.

I don't know of any SATA notebook drive that would saturate 1.5 Gbit/sec for sustained transfers. However - there are high speed SATA desktop drives that could. A 10,000 RPM 3.5" drive could easily require more than 1.5 Gbit/sec.

Firmware update and SATA II hard drive