Q: Firmware update and SATA II hard drive

As a side note, after i installed the Fijitsu 320 Gb. 5400 SATA I HD in my Macbook Pro Unibody, it is lightning fast. Not only the beachball problem was gone, i'm having 20 to 25 mb/s data transfer rate.

I'm back in business now.

The1Payday

Try this, right when you boot your computer and the SMS is still enabled, disable it! Might help, let's hope it does!

Message was edited by: David.K

I actually forced disabled the SMS and for the last several hours, I haven't had a single beach ball freezing issue associated with the EFI 1.7 update! Might be worth a try all of us with the problem.

My machine just beachballed and froze AGAIN (MacBook Pro 13" and Patriot Torqx 128GB). And this is still with the 1.6 firmware.

I decided to download a SMART Utility and run and look what I got:

http://i25.tinypic.com/71qkd3.jpg
http://i25.tinypic.com/16kql2o.jpg

Re: Firmware update and SATA II hard drive
Posted: Sep 13, 2009 12:25 PM in response to: fishbert
Reply Email

"Any drive that supports a SATA II interface will potentially expose this issue with the laptop. Size is unrelated, and platter rotation speed is unrelated … especially when talking about SSDs."

This is true. It doesn't matter the HD brand, size or speed. This problem seems to affect any SATA II 3.0 Gb/s HD.

I've tested several HD, different brands, sizes and RPMs. All SATA II 3.0 Gb/s HD presented the problem. All the SATA 1.5 Gb/s work fine. So i decided to let the biggest SATA I HD i found in the system (a 320 Gb SATA I HD) in meanwhile that Apple fix the problem with the SATA II HD.

Message was edited by: mvillarreal

============

I totally agree !!! BTW, installed back the stock FUJITSU MJA2250BH FFS G1, it has no problem. I gave up the WD 500GB....

Message was edited by: tungbh

reminder: people with beachballing on 13" macbooks and hitachi 500GB drives should check out this thread http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2084745&messageID=10205316#102 05316

pendolino wrote:
reminder: people with beachballing on 13" macbooks and hitachi 500GB drives should check out this thread http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2084745&messageID=10205316#102 05316

Why? That only serves to split the discussion.
And I doubt you will find anything discussed in those 15 pages that hasn't been discussed in our 92 pages.

If anything, I would encourage all of the people in that thread to come here, as the issue has nothing to do with Quicktime - that's just where they are noticing it.

FYI:
http://www.fujitsu.com/global/services/computing/storage/hdd/mhdd/mja2250bh-mja2 500bh.html#footnote7

Specifications
FUNCTIONAL SPECIFICATIONS
Sector Length 512bytes
Rotational Speed 5,400min-1 (5,400rpm)
Average Latency Time 5.56ms (typical)
Seek Time Read 12ms (typical)
Write 14ms (typical)
Physical
Dimensions Width 70.0mm
Depth(7) 100.0mm
Height 9.5mm
Weight 101g or less
Interface ATA8-ACS
Serial-ATA Revision 2.6 (Gen1i and Gen2i)
Power
Consumption Spin Up 5.0W (maximum)
Read, Write 1.3W (typical) [1.5Gbit/s]
1.4W (typical) [3.0Gbit/s]
Idle 0.60W (typical) [Slumber mode]
Standby 0.13W (typical) [Slumber mode]
Sleep 0.13W (typical) [Slumber mode]
Energy Efficiency (3) MJA2250BH 0.0024W/GB (d Rank)
MJA2320BH 0.0019W/GB (e Rank)
MJA2400BH 0.0015W/GB (e Rank)
MJA2500BH 0.0012W/GB (e Rank)
Data Transfer Rate 1.5Gbit/s (150MB/s), 3.0Gbit/s (300MB/s) (8)
Buffer size (4) 8MB
Acoustic Noise(5) (Idle)
2.4bels (typical)

mine is FUJITSU MJA2250BH FFS G1
G1 ->Gen1i -> 1.5Gb/s ???

Yeah, as I thought. I was starting to get beachballs with my stock drive, but since I disabled the SMS a few days back I haven't had a single beachball. Please report back when you tested it more

So for the rest who got their HDD running with beachballs, reboot, then forcing the Sudden motion sensor to be disabled as soon as the OS has loaded.

mvillarreal wrote:
Not only the beachball problem was gone, i'm having 20 to 25 mb/s data transfer rate.

I have the stock 160 HDD in the low end mac.... AJA before and after:

1.6 - Read/write 25 mb/s
1.7 - Read write 32 mb/s

So something must have changed... seemingly for the good in my case.

I did the firmware rollback from 1.7 to 1.6 and am happy that everything works flawlessly as a result, with both a stock Hitachi drive and an aftermarket 500GB Hitachi drive. QUESTION: How do I hide the 1.7 update that keeps coming up in Software Update? Please let me know, thanks in advance.

twitter.com/twiterski

I'm running the G2 version of that hard drive as of a day ago and it isn't doing so well... It was sold to me by a premium apple reseller as well and I'm not real impressed.

No beach balls yet but I'm getting the clicking noises and heat.

Start Software Update and once it shows up in the window, click on it once and then go to the Menu Bar (not in the window) and click on Update and then on Ignore Update. You can always restore the update at any time by clicking on Software Update in the menu bar and then on Restore Ignored Updates.

I am not sure they are 'exactly' the same. The 1.7 EFI update was only for the new MBP's (http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2036732&start=0&tstart=0) and it seemed to be the cause of many problems for many people.

Im Sorry, but how did you do that, i searched for the recovery cd, but there is nothing for the new Macbooks. Can you tell me how to downgrade? I found also a tool in this forum..

http://rapidshare.com/files/274725726/AluminumMacbook_ProRecovery.rar
Did you the downgrade with this one?