Q: Firmware update and SATA II hard drive

Pierce2019: Yes, I am having the issue, days old system, stock 160GB drive, and no CRC errors in SMART utility. I'm still trying to figure out what's going on here, but I'm getting beachball'd for about 10-15 seconds, every say 2-30 minutes.

I think I am having the problem, albeit much more intermittently than many others. I have the new 13", installed EFI first thing out of the box with all the other updates available. Installed Hitachi 500 few days later, and everything was great until I passed the 14 day period.
As if on queue, I started beachballing, googled and immediately found this thread. This being my first MAC, I am not overly impressed!

But, how can I be sure my problem is related? I seem to see Mozilla calling the debugger in syslog everytime it happens, and have 0 CRC errors in smart. Also, when it was occurring I reset PRAM and it seemed to be better for day or two.. Now it just happened, all apps beachballed with the firefox debug called again in logs...

Beachballing WITHOUT CRC errors is probably something other than an EFI 1.7 / hard drive issue.

I'd suspect a file permissions problem or a bad application installation. Fix permissions, check and repair the drive, trash the preference files any 3rd party apps generating errors, and install a fresh copy of that app.

Also, see that it isn't just MDS chewing up all your CPU cycles as Spotlight indexes the drive the first time.

Thanks guyko, this is encouraging news.
I have caught it in Activity monitor when all apps beachball. Drive utilization drops to 0bps in and out until it's over, then resumes as normal. CPU is not maxed out when this occurs.

I will attempt to blow away permissions and apps in hopes of resolving this. Thank you,

I had approx 2000 crc errors after a weeks use of a seagate 7200 320gb hdd, firmware 1.7, and beachballs approx every 2/3 minutes. (I'm in vmware fusion all day). After 2 weeks since jumpering the hdd to 1.5gbps, I haven't encountered a single additional crc error / beachball

Is it possible to downgrade the firmware back to 1.6? I think I am having the same problem as what is going on here, but am not with my mac right now to check. Has anyone tried downloading and running efi 1.6?

Since this thread is getting big, I think a bit of clarification is needed for people that just stumble upon this thread and get afraid.

Beachballs in certain circumstances are normal. To keep things simple, let say they are a bit like the hourglass icon you see in Windows. When I just booted up my Mac, I usually can see a 4-5 sec beachball when I first launch iTunes. This is not alarming: I have a pretty big music library and the Genius option is turned on. Same thing when I open Word 2008 sometime. And I have occasionally seen Safari hang for 2-5 sec when trying to load particular animated gifs in some discussion forums.

If your beachballs experience is similar to that, I really don't think you are having problems. It would do the same thing no matter what EFI version you are running. Depending on circumstances and hardware configuration, beachballs can be normal.

The issue discussed in this thread is more like randomly freezing 4 times in an hour while just doing regular stuff like browsing the web or copying files. Now that is a problem...

I've got this problem too. EFI 1.7, 20 second beachball at random, disk and CPU usage drop off when it occurs.

I am very disappointed and I hope that a solution is forthcoming. If a firmware release did this to us then I'd like to see another one fixing it very soon.

Jon Pye wrote:
I am very disappointed and I hope that a solution is forthcoming. If a firmware release did this to us then I'd like to see another one fixing it very soon.

I hope for this too, BUT when a solution is in the works Apple usually tells their support of this to hold exchange and get users to wait for the fix. THIS has not happened yet, why I feel that a solution is not in the works yet.

Since I cannot even use the new Seagate HD I bought last week (formatting and OSX install errors), I cannot even confirm whether or not I have a beachballing problem although it would seem likely. I have supported Apple for years but am very dismayed at their attitude concerning this problem. At this point, I'm seriously considering selling my MBP and going back to a Windows machine. I really despise the attitude that they do not support third-party drives and therefore it isn't their problem. But what I despise most is the silence and Support saying they have never heard of this problem. With so many complaining, that seems very unlikely.

Canadiandude wrote:
But what I despise most is the silence and Support saying they have never heard of this problem. With so many complaining, that seems very unlikely.

Devil's Advocate here. Perhaps this is because most users don't report this to Apple and just live with it waiting for the fix to appear. It is different to complain on this forum and reporting the problem to Apple. Best way to contribute to a solution is to report this and get a case number from Apple or send feedback to Apple. You could use Apple's online feedback form at http://www.apple.com/feedback/macbookpro.html to send a bug report for the EFI update.

I agree and have done so already. Everyone needs to follow up on this problem once they are aware of it occurring to them. This is especially true with Apple Support internationally since they likely do not receive the same amount of complaints that they do in the US and thus are less likely to be aware of the problem. It also might help to give feedback on the HD manufacturer's support site as well as they may be able to nudge Apple into doing something.

Sent my bug report too. I bought AppleCare and will be hopefully dealt with more directly when I call Monday morning.

did this a few weeks ago, not even a notice that they received my message

I've just returned from the Apple Store, actually it's a Premium Reseller, we don't have Apple stores in Argentina.
Anyway, I left my MPB13 (250GB stock HD) three days ago, today they called me because it was ready. When I get there, they told me that they didn't find anything wrong with it. I've asked to talk to the technician, he said that it's normal to have the beachball from time to time. I explained to him that it's more than that and ran the AJA System Test (http://www.aja.com/products/software/) where you can see that the HD performance drops to almost 0 MB/s when reading a 512MB file. After showing that, he took the laptop again. While I was waiting for him to return, I've run the same test on another MPB13 that they were showing. It didn't have the 1.7 firmware and the performance was a steady ~70MB/s writing and reading. Bottom line, they kept my MPB, they will look more into it and probably change the HD and memory (that's what he said).
So, it's not over but at least they recognized that something is not right. I've also mentioned this thread were they can find more information.
I recommend this AJA System Test, I've run it in several Macs and the performance is always constant not like my MBP13 with EFI 1.7.

They'll call me on Monday... I let you how it goes.