Q: Firmware update and SATA II hard drive

I moved the HD from one Unibody MacBook Pro to the newer (current gen) MacBook Pro. It wasn't the same model, the newer one has an SD slot, and the longer-life battery.

But after installation, I started from the Install CD that came with the newer machine and did an "Archive and Install" to update the OS. It's been working fine and I don't see any reason why it wouldn't, nor why a "Clean Install" would even be necessary. Sure, that's probably the "safest" course of action, but in my case it wasn't needed. I knew it was available as plan B, if so.

I've done this with many hardware upgrades over the years, many of which weren't even close to the same Mac hardware. Swapping the drive, then doing a simple OS "upgrade" or "archive and install" was all that it took... and all worked fine.

(Just saying.)

Message was edited by: Josh Rafofsky

katmeef wrote:
Guess I'll be taking the drive out and setting back to 1.5Gb/s again, the apple store's too far away and I don't want to risk running the leaked efi 1.6 downgrade available online for any length of time...

So I put the drive back to SATA I via it's firmware (yet again) and the beachballs did not stop
I was nearly convinced I had damaged the SATA cable on this most recent drive removal (too bad the hitachi feature tool didn't work on mac's..); however, I fortunately found that smartd was causing this most recent round of beachballs.

Clearly this isn't the problem for everyone, maybe I'm the only one.. but thought it was worth mentioning as the smartd beachballs were causing symptoms identical to the initial problems as soon as I put the SATA II drive in back in the summer...

Smartd was being started periodically by launchctl, and intermittently it would produce an error scanning the drives which corresponded to my beachball freakout... removed the net.sourceforge.smartmontools.smartd.plist so launchctl stopped calling it periodically, and issue appears resolved...

am going to attempt setting the drive back to SATA II to see if, indeed, PU has resolved my issues related to the SATA II / EFI..

Message was edited by: katmeef

I haven't seen much activity from new people posting with this same problem lately. I wonder if Apple quietly fixed the problem in manufacturing and have decided to address the problem on a case by case basis for people experiencing the problem. The vast majority of your average consumers are not likely to replace their drives and will never encounter the problem. So, it may just be less painful for Apple to do the repairs for people who bring them in. I guess the problem seems to be in getting an actual repair. They seem to either tell people that they don't support third party drives (which leaves us out in the cold) or they offer to revert the firmware back to 1.6 (which leaves us at an earlier firmware revision which can never be updated with newer updates). They have pretty much given themselves two ways out of the situation without doing an actual repair to allow proper operation of SATA 3GB. This can also become a warranty issue down the road when people who have stock drives decide that their drives are getting too full and they want to put in a larger one a year or two down the road... only to find out then about the problem. Even with AppleCare, Apple seems intent on not actually properly fixing the problem. I would imagine this could also be a hindrance for resale value. I have my machine at 1.6 now. If I decide to sell it in a year or two from now... I would have to tell the person buying it that they can't update the firmware or they will experience significant performance issues. Well... alrightie then... that would certainly make me think twice about buying a machine from someone. The other option would be to not say anything (which I couldn't do being the guilt ridden sap I am) and hope they don't come back to you complaining about it.

Having read a few pages, it all seems a bit worrying. I want to upgrade to a 7200 drive with larger capacity that the 160 on my 13" MBP bought in August. Is there one to buy that works?

aocaoc wrote:
Having read a few pages, it all seems a bit worrying. I want to upgrade to a 7200 drive with larger capacity that the 160 on my 13" MBP bought in August. Is there one to buy that works?

The problem has nothing to do with the RPM of the drive, I see you have read the many posts from a certain someone who feels otherwise...

If you can find a SATA I 1.5Gb/s drive (of any RPM - even SSD) you will not have this problem. Same goes if the drive you purchase can be set to SATA 1 via a Jumper or firmware tool.

Is there any way to tell what "mode" (SATA I or SATA II) our hard drive is set to, without taking it out of the machine and looking at jumpers? Anyway to test if it's operating at 1.5GB/s or 3.0GB/s?

System Profiler reports the below, but I can't tell if the " Speed: 3 Gigabit" is talking about the potential speed of the bus, or the actual throughput. This is with an upgraded 500GB drive.



NVidia MCP79 AHCI:

Vendor: NVidia
Product: MCP79 AHCI
Speed: 3 Gigabit
Description: AHCI Version 1.20 Supported

SAMSUNG HM500LI:

Capacity: 500.11 GB (500,107,862,016 bytes)
Model: SAMSUNG HM500LI
Revision: 2TF00_00
Serial Number: S1PTJ10Q642683
Native Command Queuing: Yes
Queue Depth: 32
Removable Media: No
Detachable Drive: No
BSD Name: disk0
Partition Map Type: GPT (GUID Partition Table)
S.M.A.R.T. status: Verified
Volumes:
Macintosh HD:
Capacity: 499.76 GB (499,763,888,128 bytes)
Available: 2.83 GB (2,833,633,280 bytes)
Writable: Yes
File System: Journaled HFS+
BSD Name: disk0s2
Mount Point: /

Josh Rafofsky wrote:
Is there any way to tell what "mode" (SATA I or SATA II) our hard drive is set to, without taking it out of the machine and looking at jumpers? Anyway to test if it's operating at 1.5GB/s or 3.0GB/s?

System Profiler reports the below, but I can't tell if the " Speed: 3 Gigabit" is talking about the potential speed of the bus, or the actual throughput. This is with an upgraded 500GB drive.

Looking at mfr website, it appears the drive may only be capable of communicating at SATA II speeds - I don't see any information stating it can be set otherwise.

http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/productmodel.do?type=62&subtype=67&mo del_cd=373

There is a new firmware update for (G2) Intel solid state drives:

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=18363

I am currently running a 160GB X25-M that is partitioned to leave some unallocated room at the end. Here is an interesting page about that:

http://intelstudios.edgesuite.net/idf/2009/sf/aep/IDF2009MEMS003/f.htm

I currently have the 1.6 EFI firmware. I have not run any benchmarks but the new Intel firmware makes the drive noticeably faster.

Unrelated to the firmware update:

When I purchased the drive I worked to find a way to do a secure erase without having to run to my desktop all the time. The following instructions worked perfectly for me:

http://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/ATASecureErase

I had to power cycle the drive while the system was running but that worked fine.

I started experiencing this issue about two weeks ago.
After running an WD Scorpio Blue 500GB für about nine months it started giving me the ball and hanging up on me every 20 minutes.
It got more often when I was writing and reading lots of data from the drive. Then, three days ago it became so frequent, that i bought a new drive, an Seagate Mementus 7200.4
Now nothing works anymore, in ten times of trying to install Snow Leo it works maybe two times. And then it does just the same freezing for a minute again and again.

I did not connect that all to the firmware-update, as it did not accure until three weeks ago.

I sure hope, there is a quick solution waiting..

schmax wrote:
I started experiencing this issue about two weeks ago.
After running an WD Scorpio Blue 500GB für about nine months it started giving me the ball and hanging up on me every 20 minutes.
It got more often when I was writing and reading lots of data from the drive. Then, three days ago it became so frequent, that i bought a new drive, an Seagate Mementus 7200.4
Now nothing works anymore, in ten times of trying to install Snow Leo it works maybe two times. And then it does just the same freezing for a minute again and again.

I did not connect that all to the firmware-update, as it did not accure until three weeks ago.

I sure hope, there is a quick solution waiting..

The firmware update and related problem that's the subject of this thread does not apply to your MBP. It applies to the 13" and 15" MBPs that were released in June 2009 to the present. You have another problem and you should check with Apple support.

I had the freezing problem with my vertex drive, I assumed it was because of the 3Gb SATA speed of my computer. My previous Macbook Pro (2007) ran the sata at 1.5 Gb and had no problems.
I read on a forum somewhere that the cable connecting the drive to the board could be the problem, so I opened the Mac up and disconnected the drive and had a look. I refitted the drive but did not fit it correctly (ie snugly) so the Vertex was lifted slightly from the narrow ribbon cable. I booted the Mac and to my surprise all worked well. AJA system test speeds were incredible and Xbench were good too.
I decided to screw it all back in properly so that the Vertex was then sitting tight on the SATA cable. I booted and within a few minutes I was having the same problems with lockups/drive corruption etc. The only conclusion I could draw was that the larger air gap of the incorrectly fitted drive was allowing the data to flow without corruption. The SATA bus cable needs shielding from the Vertex SSD and possibly from the Macbook Pro's aluminium case. I made two hard drive sized shields from plastic laminated kitchen foil (foil must be insulated from surrounding metalwork) and placed one between the case and the ribbon and the other between the drive and the ribbon. I screwed everything back tight and powered up. Everything worked fine and continues to do so (a week now).
I hope this solves the problems people have been having that EFI 1.7 update creates from the increased SATA speed.

I'm interested to hear how Fishbert is doing with cable replacement...

oldmanpants wrote:
I'm interested to hear how Fishbert is doing with cable replacement…

So far, so good.

One of the symptoms of this issue is an incrementing of the drive's CRC error count.* Back on the 28th (right after doing the cable replacement), S.M.A.R.T. Utility told me my CRC error count was at 6322. From early July when I upgraded to EFI 1.7, until the rollback tool was released (in August?), this was how high the counter had climbed… plus a bit from testing back-and-forth when PU1.0 showed up.

Anyway, 6322 was the count on 11/28/09. A bit ago, it read 6324 (12/05/09). I don't know where those 2 extra came from over the last week, and I'm going to continue checking in on it, but 2 is a far cry from the 6000 or so over a month, maybe a month and a half. And as for user experience, I haven't seen any of the freezing typical from this issue, either.

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* +Again, there seems to be more than 1 issue that people have come in here with, but CRC errors was identified fairly early on as a characteristic of this issue, and is one I definitely saw on my machine, so I use it here to illustrate the difference I see.+

EFI firmware update 1.8 is out!

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL975

+Well, here's a test, folks. Today, EFI 1.8 was released (http://support.apple.com/kb/DL975), and it does not appear to be targeted at this issue.+

+In fact, it does not even apply to the same set of machines -- EFI 1.7 applied to mid-2009 13" and 15" MacBook Pros, while EFI 1.8 applies to 15" and 17" MacBook Pros from 2008 and 2009 (MacBookPro5,1 and MacBookPro5,2).+

+My experience with replacing my hard drive cable is leading me to believe this is a hardware issue, not a firmware issue. But regardless, if you needed to roll back to EFI 1.6 to get your 15" machine to work, it appears that you are now frozen in time with that version of firmware.+

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Ok, strike all that, people... I misread the model break-down information.
(http://www.everymac.com/systems/by_capability/mac-specs-by-machine-model-machine -id.html)

_*This release of EFI 1.8 is not targeted toward the machines affected by this issue.*_

The 13" and 15" MacBook Pros with an SD card slot (machines possibly affected by this issue) are designated MacBookPro5,3, MacBookPro5,4, and MacBookPro5,5.

This firmware release only applies to those designated MacBookPro5,1 and MacBookPro5,2 (earlier 15" and 17" models).

I'm going to play a little game, though... as this post appears near the bottom of a page and we'll soon be moving on to a new page, I figure at least 10 people will come in here over the next few days and ask about EFI 1.8 anyway.
This will be entertaining.

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Message was edited by: fishbert