Firmware update and SATA II hard drive (continued)

The gripe is Apple will play this up to high heaven if I get council involved when all they need is a few of their ivy league engineers to sit about a table for a few minutes find the issue and release an update. They can't be serious that they can't find it or fix it? Really? They can come up with the most innovative products in human history and can't find or fix a SATA issue?

Even if the update is they will have to cap at 1.5 at least offer it up so we don't need to use hacks!

When you look how the other botches got fixed on Macbook lines it all happened very late and via threatened court action. Apple have a track record of doing this if you do some research there is many cases filed/threatened against them for like quality control stupidity.

Apple are a great company but things like this can't be left to fester and be a sensible business model. I am already NOT buying a MacBook ever again.

I stress they can dodge it on those putting in upgrades but those with failed drives who have no choice but to put in a non supported drive (so called as Apple care is using Samsung and WD's themselves for failed drive fixes). Those people have been let down by Apple as none of these drives seem to work without a downgrade on mid 2009 models.

Apple we do not want new machines we want you to fix what we have and give support guidance not let the community do it and not leave us needing hacks for a premium product!

I do not mean to come across as bad or Apple hating. I don't hate Apple I know this is an isolated incident. I am going to stop posting now as there is little more to say to Apple. Please feel my frustration in this matter and I apologise for the emotion in my posts. Thank you to the community for stepping in when Apple let me down! I will consider council but I can't add anything more by posting again.

I feel your frustration. After a few days of using my computer with the newly replaced harddrive cable the beachballs returned. The new cable did not fix this issue. I downgraded to 1.6 and now no beachballs. This is not what you would expect from a $1800 machine.

I won't go into the long history of this issue. It's pretty well set out in two very long threads, one of which was closed due to its length. When the mid-2009 MBPs were first released, some of the press picked up on this issue, including a story by Anandtech:

http://www.anandtech.com/Show/Index/2870?cPage=4&all=False&sort=0&page=5&slug=do ne-for-2009-the-holiday-macbook-pro-roundup

But eventually, the press stopped reporting on it. A few of the posters here had a theory that the shielding on the HD cable was inadequate. Simply replacing the HD cable may or may not work. One of the posters wrapped his cable in a thin layer of aluminum foil, and that solved the problem for him.

This is not like a screen problem or a Wi-Fi problem, where a user will confront it from the start. Only a very small percentage of mid-2009 MBP owners will ever replace their hard drives, which is when they may first notice the problem. So, whatever the cause of the problem, Apple has had little incentive to address it. Two years later, it's unlikely to happen.

It seems the best approach is to downgrade the SATA speed to EFI version 1.6 if you want to avoid problems with a new HD or SSD. Unfortunately, the only way to do that seems to be to use a file posted by a non-Apple forum member. My stock Hitachi 250 GB drive is still working and has plenty of free space, so I'll probably replace the computer before I need to upgrade the drive. I assume that's what Apple counted on all along.

Thanks to who invest time to analyse the problema because I spent 1 entire week trying to sort out why my mid 2009 Mac wasn't able to accept a new 500 G WD disk! I try to follow thew instruction here http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=8414998&postcount=305 but unfortunately the 1.6 EFI link was expired. Do you have a suggestion where I can find EFI 1.6 to downgrade my Mac? Thanks for help.

Try

http://www.hotfilesearch.com/download/60108501-aluminum-macbook-pro-recovery-dmg .html

Thanks. I'm gonna try this evening CET :-). Do have anyone think about to have an official claim to Apple? Is there any possibile class action to start?

I just did the downgrade to 1.6 and surprise suprise HD started to work with excellent performance. No beachball no frozen screen ... NOTHING!! Actually my HD is a WD Black Scorpio WDC WD5000BEKT-75KA9T0.

I want to tanks all the pepole here and blame on Apple!! It's a great shame .. hope someone from Apple read here!!

Invest some effort on adjusting FW 1.7 .. defined by someone a real disaster (no better definition!!)

My 15" Macbook Pro 2009 just died and I took it to Apple Store, the guru told me it could be either the cable or disk drive. Naturally I blamed the disk drive (how could a cable cause any problem?) After I went through two new disk drives, re-install OSX and still neither of them work (one WD, one Hitachi), I ended up taking it back to Apple Store and got a $17 new cable and now it works!

I google 'faulty sata cable' and realized there were so many problems with SATA cable. I don't expect Apple to issue an recall, but had the guru at Apple store told me about how pervasive the cable problem was, it could have save me a lot of time. I spent 1 month (of my spare time) ordering new drives, re-installing OSX, sending the drives back thinking they were faulty, etc...

I hate to beat a dead horse here, but I seem to be having the same problem with my mid 2010 MBP. It's a MBP 6,2. My current SMC version is 1.58f16.

My first question is how do I check what EFI version do I have? I searched around apple support site and couldn't find a clear answer on this page:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1237

I currently have two SATA drives in the machine. One is a SATA II SSD running my OS. I put the original Hitachi 500GB drive as a secondary data drive. Funny thing is it's been working fine for a year now since I put the SSD in. Just recently I started having hangs and beachball problems. Mostly with itunes. Sometimes it would hang when starting up because it's reading the itunes lib from the 500gb drive. Sometime it wouldn't start at all, I'm suspecting the drive is hanging.

What do you guys suggest that I do? Could it be a cable problem? I did a drive scan and everything seems to check out fine on the drive itself. The 500GB drive is running at 1.5gb/s speed while the SSD is running at 3Gb/s.

I own a MBP 15" Mid 2009 and thinking of upgrading my HD to Seagate 7200 750gb. My current is EFI 1.7. Could I just simply manually use the jumper to force the HD to use 1.5Gbit/s without having to downgrade to EFI 1.6?

Hi Matteo,

How did you downgrade to 1.6? What were your exact steps?

I just cloned my original 250gb to WD Scorpio Blue 750GB 5400rpm Sata II 3gb/s. And I am having the same freezing problems as most in this forum. It seems to only occur when I'm in Itunes or playing videos in quicktime.

MBP mid-2009 15"

Mac Os X Lion

thanks,

S

for myself, i'm using a jumper to cap the transfer rate at 1.5gb/s. works wonderfully.

Hi twh99,

Can you do this on sata hard disk drives. If so, how?

Ok so I plugged jumper pins that reduce power spinup on the WD sata drive. Is that what caps it at 1.5? Because it still didn't work for me. Tried watching a video and again the hdd stopped for 5seconds and started back up.