Q: Firmware update and SATA II hard drive

I'm experiencing the freezing (spinwheel etc) very often as well, but I just have the standard 250gb hard drive that comes in the high end 13 inch macbook pro. It only started after the firmware upgrade, too. Does that make sense?

yes that happened to mine intermittently. They're replacing it for me today, I'm taking mine in this afternoon and hope to find that the 1.7 was not pre-loaded on the new MBP I'm getting by exchange. I'll report on this tonight after I've unboxed it. I recommend you contact Apple.

Oh cool, I'll call them tonight then. Let me know how that goes. I'd prefer not to have to exchange mine for a new one because of software but it's annoying me.

Took mine in,the exchange was a breeze, took two minutes, just got it home, opened the box and there are five fingernail deep scratches across the white apple, opened the lid, there's a deep scratch on the keypad, closed it, called apple 1 second later, got a case number, have to exchange it again tomorrow, intolerable quality control defects on a $1200 Mac.

I followed this thread with great interest but having already ordered the hard drives I went ahead and upgraded anyway. I should mention I am new to the MBP, so I had nothing to back up etc. I just put in the new memory and the new HD and did a fresh install of OSX.

I do not seem to be getting any beachballing issues. I installed EFI 1.7 prior to exchanging the HD. It's a Western Digitial Scorpio Blue 500GB. Are there any specific applications I should run to check the stalling you guys have been experiencing? Normal browsing and usual office tasks have posed no problems for the past few hours.

Please advise.

Here are the details:

NVidia MCP79 AHCI:

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

WDC WD5000BEVT-00A03T0:

Capacity: 465.76 GB
Model: WDC WD5000BEVT-00A03T0
Revision: 01.01A01
Serial Number: *************
Native Command Queuing: Yes
Queue Depth: 32
Removable Media: No
Detachable Drive: No
BSD Name: disk0
Mac OS 9 Drivers: No
Partition Map Type: GPT (GUID Partition Table)
S.M.A.R.T. status: Verified
Volumes:
Mac HD:
Capacity: 465.44 GB
Available: 440.72 GB
Writable: Yes
File System: Journaled HFS+
BSD Name: disk0s2
Mount Point: /

foxymulder,

Try unzipping or unrarring(sp?) a large file, or transferring a large file over from an external drive while simultaneously browsing the web. Alternatively, any other hard drive intensive program may tax your hard drive to the point where it hangs as described so much already, but I have found it usually occurs when two applications are attempting to access the drive. For me, playing a recording in Logic Pro whilst any other app is running results in an "overload" error message. Good luck!

The most objective way is to download SMART utilities:
http://www.volitans-software.com/

Then click on "Attributes" "Show all".
Line "ID 199: UDMA CRC Error Count should be 0, if you see other or increasing numbers there you are experiencing the issue.

Basicaly what happens is that if there is a critical frequency of CRC errors, the beachball will start popping up as the operating system is trying to recover from the SATA bus errors.

This typicaly happens on heavy HD access or for example during Time machine backups to ext USB drives.

cheers,

Oliver.

Just sent my feedback to Apple.
I got a new MBP13 with the original 250gb Hitachi drive, the first thing I did after getting on line was installing all new updates Apple was offering. After the firmware update, I got the same problems as you.

Message was edited by: Federico Schiefelbein

Just a quick update: I did install Photoshop CS4 earlier which was imported from my home PC over wireless, no issues. I don't have Logic Pro, but I tried the Smart Utility as suggested - on Line 199, under Value I have 200, but raw value is 0. So not sure if I'm experiencing or not?

Yes "raw value" is the relevant one. If it is 0 you are ok !

Congratulations

Ollie.

Apple replaced my MacBook Pro with one that has EFI 1.6, is limited to SATA 1.

I get tons and tons of CRC errors with an SSD drive (SuperTalent UltraDrive ME 256 Gb) working in SATA 1 mode

Hello,

a big german it news site has written a news article concerning the sata problems.

http://www.golem.de/0907/68250.html

cheers
picea

I'll be trying this tonight. Will keep you posted if it works or not. Hopefully I will still be able to Dual Boot my machine without any issues.

I wanted to share some new information with anyone that might be able to temporarily utilize the same fix I've found through some very extensive research. On the Seagate drives that I have I found that there is indeed a set of pins that can be jumpered to force the drive into 1.5Gb/s mode. There is not a jumper in place and the pin set does not look like it's meant to be jumpered however as soon as I jumpered the last two pins my drive works again in my MBP. Albeit at 1.5GB/s speed but at least I'm not just sitting here waiting for Apple's Customer Relations Department to possibly return my call if they ever feel like it.

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/967/1/

got mine re-exchanged today, it didn't have the EFI 1.7 stock, so deleted the download, upgraded the memory to 4GB and she's humming along so far