Hi
I'm planning on installing a SSD on my MacBook Pro, purchased August 2011. Can anyone point me to the correct kind of disk I should buy? I have found various on Crucial's website, however they all seem slightly different - I recall Crucial being a decent make to buy from but can anyone back that up?
Thankyou.
I've found the Crucial M4 SSD to be a great option for my primary boot disk in my mac-mini server. However; you MUST make sure that it's running the v0309 firmware. Here's my experience:
I had a 'spinning beachball' issue with my Crucial M4 2.5" 256GB SSD, and found the following fix. NOTE: Do NOT update Firmware to the most recent version released 04/2012 (000F). Make sure to have your SSD backed up prior to update, unless of course you're trying to re-load.
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The SSD firmware version is stored on the SSD itself so the upgrade does not need to be carried out on the system the SSD will be used in. The easiest way to upgrade the firmware is by connecting the SSD to a system that has a CD drive.
If this is not possible, you can follow these steps to create a bootable USB flash drive and upgrade the firmware from that.
1. Connect an empty USB flash drive
2. Download rEFIt-syslinux from the link below. This will allow your USB drive to be recognized as a startup volume by the Mac.
http://blog.io101.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/rEFIt-Syslinux.dmg_.zip
3. Mount the dmg. This will mount two volumes called 'rEFIt' and 'SYSLINUX'
4. Open a Terminal and take a note of which volume is which with the command <diskutil list>
e.g. /dev/disk1 for the USB drive and /dev/disk2 for the dmg
5. Unmount (NOT eject) both volumes, after you have confirmed the two new volumes (e.g. disk1 & disk2):
diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk1
diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk2
You should get a message saying you were successful
6. Copy the dmg onto the USB drive:
dd if=/dev/disk2 of=/dev/disk1 bs=1m
You should get a message detailing the number of records in and out and number of bytes transferred
7. Eject both:
diskutil eject /dev/disk1
diskutil eject /dev/disk2
8. Unplug and plug back in the USB drive and mount the SYSLINUX volume
9. Download the firmware version 0309 for the M4 SSD here:
http://edge.crucial.com/firmware/m4/0309/Crucialm4_0309.zip
10. Unzip and mount the firmware ISO and go into the folder BOOT, then ISOLINUX
11. Copy the contents into the SYSLINUX volume
12. Delete the existing file syslinux.cfg and rename ISOLINUX.CFG to syslinux.cfg
13. Reboot your mac and hold the option key to select a boot volume and select the eEFIt volume, then choose the "Boot legacy OS SYSLINUX' option
14. Follow the instructions to update the firmware.
Installing a SSD on MacBook Pro
