Q: Firmware update and SATA II hard drive

Hello,
I just wanted to share a little information from Italy:
-first MBP 13" before efi 1.7 with ocz vertex mac edition was OK. After efi 1.7 very hard to install OSX and frequent freezes. Computer was completely unusable!!!!!!!
-exchanged MBP 13" without efi 1.7 and still using it although the only way to complete installation was to CCC the original backup to the SSD and then install it.
-now my machine is working most of the time BUT it'impossible to use time machine or CCC (firewire 400 to 800) because after 30-40 GB transfers everithing freezes.
-a part from this my MBP is fairly stable (some occasional random freezes, but rare)
-I will probably try an ocz summit ssd with the samsung controller, but I feeel that there is something wrong with apple (my frezes usually occur when data is moving from the SSD-superdrive-external drive).
Hope in fixes!!

Thank you, I've just confirmed that my MBP 2.8 was indeed shipped with EFI Firmware 1.7 pre-installed. So far, so good, 24 hours in. I have however, noticed the little "beep" noises occasionally coming from the Seagate 500Gb 7200RPM hard drive, which has been discussed in several other threads...seems that people aren't sure as to whether this is 'normal' activity for this drive or not.

Forgive my ignorance but is the Seagate 500g 7200 stock or 3rd party.

Stock...well it's a CTO order from Apple Store online.

After I installed the firmware update i get the spinner randomly for 10 to 20 seconds, most times when i watch movies or surf the internet.

i have the stock Hitachi HTS545016B9SA02 160 gb.

is there any answer from apple when they fix this, i really like this computer, but this makes me very angry.

Have you contacted Apple abut the problem?

Thank you, thank you, thank you for posting this solution! This worked perfectly on my Hitachi Travelstar 7k320. I'm now back up and running, no thanks to Apple.

Oops, I should have been more specific--

Thank you, chris.broadfoot, for posting your solution specific to the Hitachi drive on page 10 of this post.

http://discussions.apple.com/messageview.jspa?messageID=9734430&stqc=true

This worked perfectly on my Hitachi Travelstar 7k320 (use Hitachi's firmware utility to set the drive to 1.5 Gbps). I'm now back up and running! I restored my backup and have been using the machine for about an hour with no issues. S.M.A.R.T. utility shows no errors.

This has been a computing nightmare; I'm so happy it's over. Western Digital was no help ("contact Apple, nothing we can do"), Apple was no help ("contact Western Digital, nothing we can do"), but CompUSA was a big help! They allowed me to exchange my Scorpio Blue 320 for the Hitachi despite the drive being several months old. I'm lucky I saved the receipt and that the store associate was so nice.

After 3 weeks of these problems, it's ridiculous that we can't even go back to the previous firmware. And firmware 1.7 is still posted on Apple's site, ready to break even more Macs.

Ok Back up and running with the hitachi method described earlier. Here's the path I took:

1. Left the offending drive in my MBP formatted as a Mac Drive
2. Booted to my "old" 250 gig drive that originally came with the system that I put in an external enclosure via USB.
3. Used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my "old" drive to the offending drive since the OS recognized the offending drive and it could be written to.
4. Went to see Transformers 2 (optional)
5. Pulled offending drive out of the MBP and hooked it up to my PC.
6. Ran the Hitachi "Set my drive to 1.5 GBPS cripple" utility.
7. Put Offending drive back in MBP.
8. Booted up fine.
9. Ran Xbench
10. Copy and pasted results here. Your mileage may vary.

Results 106.99
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.5.7 (9J3050)
Physical RAM 4096 MB
Model MacBookPro5,4
Drive Type Hitachi HTS545050B9A300
CPU Test 168.17
GCD Loop 295.54 15.58 Mops/sec
Floating Point Basic 142.42 3.38 Gflop/sec
vecLib FFT 119.30 3.94 Gflop/sec
Floating Point Library 200.07 34.84 Mops/sec
Thread Test 308.16
Computation 450.50 9.13 Mops/sec, 4 threads
Lock Contention 234.17 10.07 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads
Memory Test 157.00
System 166.79
Allocate 224.10 822.98 Kalloc/sec
Fill 142.60 6933.57 MB/sec
Copy 153.57 3172.02 MB/sec
Stream 148.30
Copy 142.28 2938.80 MB/sec
Scale 138.04 2851.81 MB/sec
Add 157.84 3362.28 MB/sec
Triad 157.12 3361.10 MB/sec
Quartz Graphics Test 141.78
Line 133.59 8.89 Klines/sec [50% alpha]
Rectangle 165.98 49.55 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
Circle 140.57 11.46 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]
Bezier 141.87 3.58 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha]
Text 131.71 8.24 Kchars/sec
OpenGL Graphics Test 102.21
Spinning Squares 102.21 129.66 frames/sec
User Interface Test 142.70
Elements 142.70 654.93 refresh/sec
Disk Test 38.43
Sequential 99.94
Uncached Write 94.79 58.20 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 108.14 61.18 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 83.51 24.44 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 121.16 60.90 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 23.79
Uncached Write 7.60 0.80 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 72.26 23.13 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 67.55 0.48 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 125.21 23.23 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Despite what someone said earlier on, a jumper to limit my Seagate drive seems to have solved the problem for me (two days running so far).

Just waded through this entire thread, sent this via the feedback link to Apple:
{quote:title=pinkbeats wrote:}Afternoon,
I recently bought the latest MacBook Pro 15" 2.53Ghz and after it had to be repaired due to the DVD drive not working out of the box, I was made aware that the HDD was a user serviceable part. Thus before I went to collect it after it had been repaired, I ordered a 320GB 7200rpm WD Scorpio Black HDD (Model: WD3200BJKT-75F4T0) with a view to replacing the standard 250GB Hitachi HDD that came installed. After spending the best part of two days trying to install OS X (10.5.7) without success before putting the original HDD back in, I came across this thread in your own discussion forums:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2054387
So whilst I was on the brink of returning the Western Digital HDD back, it appears the issue could be to do with the EFI 1.7 firmware update. If that is the case, can you confirm if it will be remedied so that I can use the HDD drive that I purchased?
Thanks & regards.{quote}

I think it's a bit weak if their stock response is that they don't support third-party HDDS. Surely if that were the case, it would be contingent on them to specify exactly what HDDs are compatible since it's a user serviceable part? I await the next firmware update when it comes, if as previous posters have indicated, they are working on it.

fishbert,

Could you please post a link to how you were able to "fix" your situation by finding a jumper on your Seagate drive?

Thanks!

Stop calling locking harddrives to the slower SATA I after the update of the firmware to SATA II a fix. It's not and you are just clouding the issue here.

I agree it is important that you post what you have done but it is only a band-aid to the problem which Apple needs to fix. It gives the impression that Apple need not do anything because you've found that it was a 3rd party hardware setup issue. Keep in mind that the stock drives are also experiencing this problem.

I actually sort of "found" a fix. There are two satas on the mbp. I connected the optical bay drive's sata to my ssd.

And it worked!
And I connected it to some 3rd party external hdd. And nope. No click sounds.

So you might want to try it as a temporary "permanent" solution.