SSD Invalid node structure on MBP 4,1

I would have recommended Diskwarrior, but now that you mention you've used it, then I suspect the drive is either already damaged, or the firmware is still incompatible with your Mac. Hopefully you are keeping good Time Machine backups for your user account.

Getting a new drive would probably be the best advice, and making sure the latest firmwares are installed is always a good idea. Who knows... maybe the old firmware caused the damage. SSD manufacturing methods and drive/file management firmwares are really still in development. Even Apple's support for TRIM is limited to drives they provide.

For the best support for Macs and hard drives I use OWC. They stand behind their products and provide great technical support. My problem is that the larger drives are just too expensive to play with just yet.

SSD's are very attractive, and I'll keep looking, but I can't depend on one for my existing Mac's in a business as a boot drive.

I am still not sure if it could be my mac causing this chaos with the drive or the SATA cable being faulty.

You could try running the Apple Hardware Test from the Applications disc that came with your Mac. It's not very reliable, though. The only way to be sure is to replace the SSD with a known-good one.

Hi, I ran into exactly same problem (MacBook Pro + Kingston SSDNow V100 Series 128GB).

I published a detailed description in the following forum (it is in Czech but you as a Slovak will understand):

http://forum.mujmac.cz/read.php?117,5188215

Not even a Kingston SSD firmware update solved the problem.

The only way was using DiskWarrior and even that did not solve the problem in all cases it happened.

I will ask the seller for replacement and next time I will choose another SSD brand (probably Intel or OWC).

There is some work to be done to restore SSD runnning OS X; and there is a 3rd party TRIM diver but a lot of SSDs really need new firmware, even OWC with theirs has only recently provided the latest firmware 2.0 for Sand Force controller.

The road to SSD has had a lot of changes and pitfalls and of course now faced with SATA3 for some. And are now often but not always use Marvell chip.

I'd also look at Corsair, which is what I use and uses SF-1200 and Micron NAND, pretty much the same as OWC was.

I'm having a similar problem with my MacBook 4,1, but with an Intel 510 series 120GB drive. Actually, the error occured on two of them. The first time, I installed from a known good backup, after a day or two I had various minor problems in Disk Utility (ivalid file count, invalid inode number, etc..). After repairing in single user mode (my wonderful wife accidentally threw away the original install disks ages ago), the same errors would come back up a few days later. I finally tried rebuilding the catalog B tree using fsck in single user mode, which made the orginal errors disappear seemingly permanently.

3 months later, things went horribly wrong. The computer died suddenly, with the error "Invalid node structure." I wiped and restored from a backup, but same thing 2 days later. Got a new drive from Intel, and 4 days in had the exact same problem.

Is this possibly a problem with how OS X handles the drive itself?

Oh, I forgot to mention, when using the same backup on a standard HDD, I have no issues whatsoever.

I've had the EXACT same series of events as himynameismarek, in the last week... I even noticed that it consistently seems to be happening right after an update and restart... In fact, I'm not so sure it isn't related (somehow) to the update process, because of something that happened tonight:

Since my last crash/reformat/reinstall (about three days ago), I've been verifying the hard disk a few times a day to monitor things. Tonight, I received a notification to install the Safari 5.1.2 update. After it finished (and it prompted me to restart), it occurred to me that I should check my disk before restarting... Sure enough, when I verified with Disk Utility, it said I had a disk error and needed to repair (which of course fails also, and the cycle begins again). HOWEVER, before I restarted, I copied all the logs from my console from today, so I'm hoping I might find some clues there (although I'm fairly novice, so it may not be realistic).

If anyone had any additional info (beyond disk warrior and/or get a new drive), it'd be greatly appreciated. BTW, my drive is also a 256 GB Kingston (only 8 weeks old) and was supposed to have the firmware upgrade already... My MacBook is a late 2009 13-inch MacBook Pro.

I have the same problem with Kingston SSDNow V100 Series 128GB installed on my late 2008 Macbook unibody running Snow Leopard. This is the 3rd time I resinstalled the OS/X, excluding the other 3 times it manage to repair the disk itself. All these happen within 3 months of using Kingston. My friends who use Intel and Corsair don't seem to have this problem. I'm so p*ssed off with Kingston since I've spent about $200 on this drive.

I have even upgrade the firmware according to Kingston's support. Its strange that the manual on firmware upgrade from Kingston solely mention how to do it on PC, and never mention about Mac. The firmware is in a Freedos format and can run on all OS. Does it mean this drive only support Windows???

Anyway, I start to monitor closely on what I did everytime the SSD crash. My suspect is the database file from Microsoft Outlook for Mac 2011. It seems the SSD give me problem when I do something with my emails, e.g. download lot of emails from server, or close Outlook while downloading emails. Are all of you using Outlook?

For those who manage to get a replacement disk, which supposely newer batch. Does it help?

This make sense to me. My Macbook battery is bloated ( that's another story ) so I took it out. I'm using my Macbook on power supply alone, and sometimes the power is off suddenly. So this maybe the source of the problems if the SSD cannot handle the power/current properly. My original 2.5" and my external WD drives never had problems when power is off suddenly. Too bad I cannot use my bloated battery as it affect the track pad.

Another point to note is I use uTorrent to download files, and I let it run overnight most of the time. Now I download to my external WD drives directly and also use it as time machine backup. Now I start to wonder if I would encounter the same problem had I bought Intel or Corsair in the first hand......

I have exactly same problem with Kingston SV100S2 128 GB. Invalid Node Structure, couldn't boot up my MBP 2008. Every time used Disk Warrior to recover. Put old HDD back - no problem for about a month, but it is so sloooowwww after even Kingston SSD, I also have OCZ 60GB Vertex 2 on my desktop and never had any problems with it during last 18 months of continuous usage. Installed SSD back, did a fresh install of Lion, turned off hybernation, thinking about what else to do. BTW, it's worth mentioning that I have very old battery and it usually holds not more than a 45 min. I'm currently thinking about turning TRIM on. Any ideas if this helps? I also had a problem with SSD after updating OS X, or installing MS Office package. It looks like SSD was doing something on its own and then got interupted by rebooting (after update installation, or other software installation), may be that was Garbage Collection... Still investigating...

Almost can conclude that the SSD problem is caused by my bloated battery. My last restoration was 2 weeks ago and I was using my Macbook on power supply without the bloated battery. This seems ok ( i verify the disk everyday ) until last Thursday when I put back the bloated battery in. After few hours of usage ( from bloated battery alone ) and recharge, I found my SSD has invalid node structure again.

It seems that the unstable power from old or bloated battery that cause the SSD to fail. If the SSD work without the bloated battery, I'll keep using this until i upgrade my Macbook when the new pro come out next year. Tired of the restoration process.....

Power fail from bad battery seems like a very very legitimate reason for SSD to fail. Kingston SSD SV100S2 128 GB consumes around 1-1.5A (if I'm not mistaking, I've already put it in my MBP), I could not get it running from the external USB enclosure (with out additional power supply), in the same time original Hitachi HDD consumes 0.7A, other OCZ SSD I have consumes 0.35A. So, I think this particular Kingston SSD is very sensitive to power supply and old/bad batteries cannot provide stable power output.

I also turned TRIM on (Mac OSX Lion). We'll see if it helps.