Q: Firmware update and SATA II hard drive

oceangurl wrote:
I got Kernel Failures at boot after installing Leopard. I was able to force the OS to load, and repair it. Installed Snow Leopard, and was unable to do a clean install - it failed 6 times in a row. I was able to reinstall Leopard and then do an upgrade install, and now am in Snow Leopard finally. It is still having random freeze ups and beach balling which seems to be much worse than it was in Leopard. After migrating my data over from my other drive, computer locked up and wouldn't boot. I had to let it cool down and then it booted again, so seems to be some sort of heat issue as well?

Also, I have a Boot Camp install of Windows Vista and it runs very smooth. No hanging up at all, even can play intensive 3D game Everquest2 on high quality settings without issue. If I try to play even a less intensive game, such as WoW on the OSX partition it hangs and beachballs to the point the game is unplayable. If I boot the same drive over USB in an external enclosure, I can run all the MacOSX applications and WoW without any freeze-ups.

It sounds to me like you are experiencing a hard drive problem. If it were the firmware issue discussed here, your Windows partition would be acting up as well. I'd suggest getting a replacement from Seagate and trying again. Nothing says you won't run into the firmware issue with a replacement drive, but it may be worth a shot.

Matthew Sigal wrote:
This sounds like what has been discussed in this thread... BUT, it is on a 13" MacBook. Not pro. Would rolling back that firmware update help in this case? Or is this particular issue only on the Pro machines?

If I am mistaken and this thread isn't relevant, can anyone point me in the direction of something that would? This is drastically affecting our work. Thanks in advance!

The SATA II interface issue of this thread is only known to affect the 2009 13" and 15" MacBook Pros with the SD card slot. Some say they also see it on the 17" MacBook Pro, and maybe you're seeing it as well... but it's not known to be an issue on your machine.

Fishbert: It happened on 2 different drives. Both work fine in external enclosures.

I returned to the stock 160GB Hitachi drive and did a clean install of Snow Leopard (did not need to install Leopard first this time around). So far everything is running smooth without any freezing or beachballs. As it should be. Going to keep one of the Seagate drives in an external enclosure for now until there is a working fix from Apple, if not I guess I will have to save up and buy a larger drive from them. grrr.

oceangurl wrote:
Fishbert: It happened on 2 different drives. Both work fine in external enclosures.

I returned to the stock 160GB Hitachi drive and did a clean install of Snow Leopard (did not need to install Leopard first this time around). So far everything is running smooth without any freezing or beachballs. As it should be. Going to keep one of the Seagate drives in an external enclosure for now until there is a working fix from Apple, if not I guess I will have to save up and buy a larger drive from them. grrr.

Well, that's weird then. If what you are seeing is a problem with the firmware SATA interface control, then whether you're on OS X or Windows, it would still be a problem. But then if it's not a SATA interface problem, it probably wouldn't go away when you change interface.

I checked on WD website about the WD5000BEVT, a 500GB, 5400rpm, is SATAII (3Gb/s), see: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=506 , so this HD is capable of 3Gb/s, and MBP can only handle 1.5Gb/s ? how can a Fastest SSD on the market can fix this problem without rollback the Firmware as people claimed in this forum? One more question, are all Express Card version of MBP users do not have this SATA II problem?

Does any one has tried this:
use 7200rpm HD and use the apple patch,
then put 5400rpm HD (problem), and see if that helps?

tungbh wrote:
Does any one has tried this:
use 7200rpm HD and use the apple patch,
then put 5400rpm HD (problem), and see if that helps?

The firmware update regarding the 7200rpm click/beep problem was firmware that lives in the hard drive itself. It does nothing to change the laptop itself, so when you swap the drive back, everything is exactly the same as before.

I agree that this behavior doesn't fit the Firmware profile. Having said that, I can't imagine what it might be. I would suggest a clean OS X install, but you've already done that.

Did you import your user settings on that "clean" install? I suggest avoiding that at least for a test run.

It could be that you've got something else wrong in hardware. Still, Windows should experience the same problems. Of course Windows is a very different OS and may somehow avoid the problem. If you have a friend with a similar model, you could swap your drive into their system and see if the problem happens there.

iliveinyourhead,

I have a genius appt tomorrow. One of the geniuses called me last night and said that he had been researching the issue all day based on the conversation he had with the AppleCare technician that I spoke with. He confirmed that they do, in fact, have the rollback tool and that they will try it on my machine on Thursday, 10:40 AM, EST time. I will give out my incident # after that meeting and give a detailed report of exactly what happened.

Oddly enough, my computer hasn't encountered the spinning beach ball of death almost 24 hours. The genius yesterday had me create a firmware restore CD (efi 1.6) and boot my computer with it. Nothing happened at all, but for some reason since then, no beach balls. Still gonna get the rollback though.

I can say with some confidence that the engineers are working on this issue and will provide a fix in time.

Billy thanks a ton. I hope that the incident i opened yesterday is making some progress in the backend.

HOpefully your issues are fixed! good luck

MacService/MyService recently released a 750GB Western Digital 5,200rpm drive for Macbook Pros. Would this have an issue you think?

I'm ignorant but I'm starting school soon and I can't be bothered with having the most expensive brick in the world.

Is there any option as far as ssd or any drives that don't have issues or does everything so far have issues?

I can duplicate this error 100% of the time by transferring files to or from the hard drive in the Macbook. Has anyone else tried to duplicate the issue this way?

For example, if I transfer 1GB of photos over a wireless N, or gigbit network, or external drive, the computer will freeze numerous times during transfer. From an external drive, the transfer starts off at about 30MB/s, but will suddenly freeze usually a few hundred MB's into the transfer. Once it unfreezes 10-60 seconds later, the transfer immediately resumes transferring at about 30 MB/s until the next freeze. If I swap out the drive for the stock drive and perform the same transfers, I have no issues at all. But every aftermarket drive I have tried has the same issue with freezing during heavy use.

If anyone can duplicate my scenario above and come to the same result, it may help Apple to fix this. Maybe not though.

Day 2 on the stock drive, and everything is still running great. Not one beachball. The other 2 drives I tested were brand new Seagate drives, fresh installs of Leopard and had the beachballing/hanging issues. The 7200 RPM drive was much worse than the 5400 RPM drive. Back to the stock drive now, and all is good. So for me, the issue only is occurring on the third party drives it seems. It's possible the issue is less pronounced in a native Windows install and did exist, but to a lesser extent when running Vista in bootcamp. I only setup the bootcamp partition to test it out, so my time in Windows OS was limited compared to the majority of my time in OSX. Just my observations for what its worth.

Keep in mind that Apple uses their own special firmware on their stock drives which third party drives do not have. It would be nice to be able to flash our third party drives with the Apple HD firmware just to see if it makes a difference but that isn't an option.

I have read of users switching the SATA connector from the optical drive to the HD and vice versa with good results. Anyone here tried that option? This is just an observation from another forum that I thought I'd share here although it likely was already mentioned earlier in the thread.

I bought two Macbook Pros, one 15" Mid2009 and the other 17" Mid2009 for the company I am working. And I tried to replace the harddisks with brand new models from Corsair, exactly the Corsair X256 SSD and I am experiencing the same issues. It is not possible to get working the SSDs.

Snow Leopard fails to install. Leopard 10.5 go trough but after a while the system freezes, especially when doing a lot of copying files. I tried duplicating big Files (Double Layer DVD Images) and after a while the system freezes.

After doing a lot of testing I called Apple Support in Germany and talked about the problem but they didnt heard about the problem (!!). And additionally they didnt know about EFI 1.7 Firmware Update Problems!?

So in my opinion we should do more calls and writing emails at Apple to get this issue fixed. Its a fact that there exists a problem with this Macbooks, so they have to fix it, soon!

ps.: the Corsair X256 SSD is working fine in my old Macbook 15" from Early2008