Firmware update and SATA II hard drive

I have a current model Macbook Pro 15", and after the Firmware Update my original hard drive has been beachballing on Safari, Mail, the Finder, and various other apps at random times. At the same time, if my Macbook is beachballing and it gets moved at all, I can hear and feel a clicking coming from the lower right wrist wrest area. So, has the firmware started to hose my hard drive?

Add me to the list. Brand new MBP 15" 2.66. The stock Hitachi 320 gb works fine but my new Hitachi 7200 rpm 320 gb will not boot the machine. It will recognize the disk installed on firewire after a lot of work. Looks like the firmware got me! I may take this one back and get the previous model as a refurb.

Just to add some information. Every times my MacBook Pro beachballs since the EFI 1.7 update, I get the folloing added in system logs:

{quote:title=Console:}09-06-27 12:42:01 smartd[71] Device: IOService:/AppleACPIPlatformExpert/PCI0@0/AppleACPIPCI/SATA@B/AppleMCP79AHCI/PR T0@0/IOAHCIDevice@0/AppleAHCIDiskDriver/IOAHCIBlockStorageDevice, failed to read SMART Attribute Data{quote}

I also have a lot of trouble reading SMART informations with smartctl (smartmontools) after a beach ball appeared. Sometime it works, but I get more often errors from smartctl

This appears to be a controller issue. The fact that they are issuing a firmware update and not a driver update says to me that they got something wrong in the hardware setup on these new models.

I have a brand new MBP 15 w/500-7200 drive upgrade. I saw this Software Update pop up this morning on the weekly check and learned a long time ago to ALWAYS read the release notes before letting these things loose. In this instance I was alarmed when I read the EFI update warning. Initially what concerned me was the remark about it increasing the drive throughput from 1.5 3.0 gbps for "a small number of customers" using SATA/300 third party drives and was even more surprised by the comment about Apple never having provided anything but SATA/150 drives.

This prompted me to take a closer look at the System Profiler which in fact reported that the OEM drive supplied was a Seagate ST9500420ASG which is one of their top-of-the-line notebook SATA/300 notebook drives, so they've clearly supplied 3 Gbps drives. The problem however appears to be with the Nvidia drive controller setting. While it would appear to be 3 Gbps rated (System Profiler reports that it supports AHCI 1.2), it is currently set to 1.5 Gbps.

So I am not touching this firmware upgrade until I've had a chat with Apple through my edu channel and will report back. Apple and Nvidia crammed an awful lot into that chipset and I'm not very familiar yet with its performance but it would not surprise me if this turns out to be an "Aw ****!" problem when they come out of the gate with "3.0 Gbps drives? We ain't ever supplied no stinkin' 3.0 Gbps drives!"

I installed the 1.7 firmware update on my new MacBook Pro, got a "successful" install message, however on subsequent boots of the laptop the next day the computer froze up completely and would not recognize the drive.

Luckily, I had a firewire backup (bootable using SuperDuper) and was able to boot from that drive, then erased the main disk, then do a restore from the firewire drive. So, its good that the main disk was responsive to the erase command.

Also, I ran the Apple hardware tests (no errors); ran disk utility repair on the main disk (from external boot); S.M.A.R.T shows no errors, wrote 10 gig to the drive, all seems ok and the speed of the drive is listed as "3" which I think was the purpose of the firmware.

Apple has offered to replace the computer completely, not sure if it is necessary now though.

Now that it is working ok, do you think it is OK to keep this one, or should I take up Apple on a complete replacement of the laptop ?

Thanks

i got a 13" MBP and i get random beach balls for 10/15 seconds since the firmware update, and i haven't upgraded my hard drive either.

Can we say ****** off. I'm at the apple store now and they are saying that they thing the firmware update killed the drive. He is saying that taking the drive out and putting it in a USB enclosure doesn't even allow the drive to be seen. He also said that Apple people are telling him to put my original 250GB back in and send me home because third party drives are not supported. If he gives me anymore crap I'm returning this **** thing and charging it back and writing apple a letter to get them to pay for the drive they supposedly killed. This is absolutely rediculous.

Hello everyone. I have been reading through this thread and have a couple questions. I recently upgraded to the new firmware but am still using the original 160GB HD that came with my Macbook Pro. I just ordered a 500GB WD Scorpio Blue that should be here next week. I was planning on cloning the current drive to the new one with SuperDuper.

I'm trying to get advice on whether or not I should go through with the cloning and installing the new drive? Will I run into any problems with this? Does the firmware update carry over onto the new drive with the cloning process?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Alright... so the ending of the story is this....

The Genius (if you can call anyone working at Apple that) told me that he was talking to some technicians on Apple's internal support website and that third party hard drives are not supported.. so I should just put my original drive in and be on my way. The guy helping me said that was bogus and he'd wait to talk to someone else. He ended up taking my WD 500GB drive out and putting it into an external enclosure and saying it wouldn't work at all and that the firmware update probably fried my drive. Of course I had to explain to him how this isn't even possible and he finally agreed. So he tried my drive in another enclosure and he said it spins up fine.

He then came out and told me that after speaking to someone else, they think what happened is that the EFI firmware update possibly silently corrupted the firmware (the chip soldered on the logic board) and that they would need to replace the logic board.... however, since my laptop was within 14 days they'd just replace it out right. I ended up telling him, forget it.. just return it and give me my money back as I can afford to have this happen to me again. He agreed, and I got my money back. He said that he was going to ship the laptop back to Apple for them to do a root cause analysis (he used a different term) on how the update caused all these events to occur and see if this issue is a possible pandemic or not. He apologized and told me that everything that occurred was definitely not my fault and just coincidence and he was sorry for all the hassle.

Anyhow, that's my story. I'm now at home back on my pre-unibody 15" MBP and glad I had a Time Machine backup of all my crap!! In fact.. I took my now SPARE WD 500GB hard drive and re-formatted and am using it as yet another Time Machine backup.

Have fun trying to figure out what exactly is wrong with your computer..... I'm just glad I don't have to deal with this crap anymore.. at least for a little while.

dave,

You need to understand how this "firmware update" works. It updates a chip on the logic board/motherboard in the laptop, so any problems Apple introduced will affect ANY hard drive you plug into the machine. It's not a problem with the hard drive, its entirely a problem with Apple's firmware and apparently its hit or miss..... which also makes no sense.

Just wanted to chime in and share my experience with this issue so far.

Ever since I updated the firmware, my OCZ Summit 120GB SSD no longer works in my 15" June 2009 Macbook Pro. Whenever I install it and then try to install OSX, I can never make it through the installation. BUT, if I take it out, put it in my external enclosure, and proceed to do the install via USB, it installs flawlessly. If I then try to boot it up via USB, it works just fine. But, reinserting it into the Macbook and trying to boot up always fails.

So, it seems like people's hard drives have not been "fried" (as some people have mentioned before). It just seems that Apple made some sort of mistake with the firmware where the SATA controller can no longer connect properly with some hard drives.

The one perplexing thing is that my friend has the same hard drive installed on his June 2009 13" Macbook Pro and he has not had any issues. Different hardware? Just random occurrences? Any opinions on this?

I think we need to let Apple hear about this just as we did when they downgraded the SATA to 1.5. Email Phil Schiller, Steve Jobs, leave feedback at http://www.apple.com/feedback/macbookpro.html. Let's be heard to make sure that these issues are fixed!

PCMike. I'm still within 14 days of my return. What if I clone my HD that is currently in my machine now to the 500GB WD I ordered, then return the Macbook Pro for another one that has the old firmware? Then drop the 500GB into the new machine. Would this be ok? Or do you still foresee any problems with that?

I bought the stock MacBook Pro 13" (2.26GHz) and increased the memory to 4GB by paying the additional $100 to have Apple do it for me. But I bought a Seagate Momentus 7200.4 ST9500420AS 500GB 7200 RPM 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive from NewEgg.com and installed it myself. I also have updated and installed my firmware and I don't have a single issue or problem with computer. In fact I've noticed that my computer's HD runs faster than before the firmware update. Interesting that everyone here is having a problem. Perhaps it is limited to Apple's upgraded HD models? But no problem here. Love my new 13" MBP. It is the quietest, coolest running MBP ever!!

Yes.. I getting it as well on the stock Apple drive. Keep getting the lockups and spinning wheel after the update.

It seems that most of the people reporting problems here are in fact using third party drives.

So, question is: why on earth would you crack open a brand new MBP and swap out the OEM drive for a third party drive? I mean, like the upgrade to the 500/7200 drive was only $135. I could understand this if you had a loaded SATA/300 from another machine that you wanted to swap out, but many people here are talking about ordering new drives and putting them in these new machines. Why? Are you trying to save a few bucks or do you really think that you are going to see an appreciable increase in performance?

In my opinion, in either case you are making a mistake and probably are deserving of the misery you're experiencing.