Q: Firmware update and SATA II hard drive

EuroKRN wrote:
Well hmm.. am I posting in the right topic?

My issue is with a new MBP 13" patched with the EFI 1.7 firmware update but I get the same 30 second beachball lockup but with the stock 160GB Hitachi drive (which is supposedly SATA-I).

It sounds like you may be in the right place.

Here's a (probably imperfect) checklist...
1) you have a 13" or 15" MacBook Pro from mid-2009 with the SD memory card slot.
2) you have installed the EFI 1.7 firmware update from late June, or you have a machine that came with it pre-installed.
3) you experience beachballs that last anywhere from 30-90 seconds before the system recovers -- you may get an error message if your system was syncing an iPod or something at the time, but other than that your system does recover.
4) if you move your drive to an external firewire (or USB?) enclosure and boot from that (hold the "Option" key at the power-on chime to select), the beachballs are gone.

There are other symptoms (CRC errors, question mark folder at start up, etc.), but that right there is a simple first-level diagnosis.

Also, check out http://vimeo.com/5854152 -- this is an example of what the issue looks like on my machine.
(also has some good audio snips between the hangs -- "watch this" and "worth every penny", haha)

before 10.5.8

its been about 5 days since ive experienced any beach balling, i did nothing. it just stopped, cant explain it

Alright. Guess I'm in the right place as #1/2/3 directly apply. Haven't tried #4. But yeah, I was using the stock drive. Waiting to get my machine back from Apple and if they didn't fix it, I've got a 256GB Samsung SSD I'm going to try.

As we are getting so many messages here I thought it would be great to get some factual data. I have setup a poll and would appreciate if you could participate so we get some view on the issue. Especialy if you do not experience the issue either from the start or if Apple fixed it for you it would be great to know:

http://www.micropoll.com/akira/mpview/637703-191575

The poll is anonymous, but you can leave some comments if you want.

best regards,

Oliver.

what application were u using to incur this freeze? vaja what? how can i reproduce this

ok. thanks for answering.

As soon as I get my MBP back, (they won't have done anything, I reckon.) I'll do the update on the fastest of my disks and I'll tell you guys for sure if that solved the problem - for me. (I know what the activity monitor graph looks like on that disk when it's not working correctly so I can tell.)

Peter Di Arcangelo wrote:
what application were u using to incur this freeze? vaja what? how can i reproduce this

I can't tell if you're referring to me or not, but all I did was copy a video file while watching another video in quicktime. The AJA System Test program was only there to show a measure of hard drive data transfer speed.

Anyway, I had two video files of 600-700 MB in size on my desktop. I opened one in Quicktime and started playing it, then made a copy of the other (hold 'Option' and drag the file - should have a little green plus icon near the cursor to indicate a copy action). Then watch the video in Quicktime lock up repeatedly for a minute or two each time.

The file being copied doesn't have to be a video, I just wanted something relatively large that would take a minute or two to copy normally.

I have been duplicating one of my VMs (Fusion) while running Safari in the foreground on a non-cached page (ie. flush the cache) to repro. The VM is about 40GB so I'm usually able to repro while it's copying.

just tried a brand new wd caviar blue 500gb (made in june) in my 15" 2.53ghz. It fails just like the Seagate 7200.4.

Interestingly I tried the same caviar in a brand new, just out of the box 15" 2.53ghz, with 1.7 pre-installed. it works fine. even swapped the drive out again and re-ran the tests. fails every time in mine, and is OK in the new one.

might be time to try to get the logic board changed on mine.

My MBP is now completely useless!

I've got the MBP 13" with the stock HD inside as original. EFI 1.7 started creating random freezes and completely crashes.

Is there anyway AT ALL of rolling back the EFI firmware with the Mac OS X install disc?

I might take the MBP to a genius bar tomorrow.

Unfortunately there's no way of rolling it back. The only thing you can do is get the MBP replaced as of now.

Call Apple Care! And make them fix it!

so finally called applecare back for some follow-up

I was advised initially that there's no new FW update coming down the line to 'correct the issue' (at this point the rep was acting as though he was familiar with the problem). Mentioned the work-around I did on the 5k500.b and he proceeded to tell me this might "be a hardware-firmware issue" and they might be creating an article in self-support directing hitachi owners to the hitachi website.

At this point I asked him to visit the thread personally to see that it was not a problem just with the 5k500.b.. he then started giving some attitude, the 'you're the first i've heard of this' line... of course I then asked for supervisor and, after a very extended hold (+30 minutes), spoke to the product specialist..

He told me that he frequently visits the forum whenever he is unable to resolve an issue for a customer, and has personally spoken to the engineering team on this issue in the past. He assures me they are fully aware and working towards a solution, but cannot provide any ETR at this time. I got him to document the work-around that has worked for me (hitachi feature tool to muzzle the drive down), and was advised to be patient some more...

BTW south africa have you heard anything else from your inside source?

I own the 5k500.b Hitachi drive and was wondering if I do choose to set the transfer maximum to 1.5Gb/s, if there will be any chance at all that I would be able to tell the difference between if I had it set to 3.0Gb/s?

I'm considering not even trying to install it with the 3.0Gb/s enabled.

kaikou wrote:
I own the 5k500.b Hitachi drive and was wondering if I do choose to set the transfer maximum to 1.5Gb/s, if there will be any chance at all that I would be able to tell the difference between if I had it set to 3.0Gb/s?

I'm considering not even trying to install it with the 3.0Gb/s enabled.

The only difference I see is a lack of beachball freezes
The drive specifications state "Performance Up to 875Mb/s media transfer rate", I expect only the drives internal cache would have the ability to transfer data above this rate, so I would really be surprised if you noticed any performance degradation.

http://www.hitachigst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/FFA370A7BF845F87862574FE0003 054C/$file/TS5K500.BDSfinal.pdf