[Solved] Beachballs on late 2008 15" MacBook Pro MacBookPro5,1 with SATA II HD

I should add that my symptoms after upgrading to the Seagate 1TB hybrid drive were *much* worse than annoying beachballs. There were frequent system freeze ups requiring pressing-and-holding power button for 10 seconds to recover. Typically these ocurred during heavy disk activities, for example, installing a large software package in a Parallels VM.

Once I installed the SATA drive jumper to slow it down to SATA I 1.5 Gbit/seconds I have seen zero beachballs, zero system lock ups. Performance wise I see no detectable difference.

All credit to solving this problem is reserved for Kempton Lam

• http://kempton.wordpress.com/2013/01/17/how-i-resolved-my-seagate-750gb-momentus -xt-hybrid-drive-nightmare/
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5Zg1My9d3o

See Segate jumper digram below.

Diagram shows hard disk laying "upside down" with circuit board on top. A jumper is installed across the two left-most pins. Short jumpers are needed. I carefully snipped a normal jumper with a pair of side cutters to reduce the height enough so that the SATA cable connected well enough:

http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/193991en

>I should buy you a drink sir!!

Please BitTorrent me a nice IPA beer past my company firewall. ;-)

I am glad it solved your problem. I had suffered for literally *years* with this problem on my late 2008 15" MacBook Pro. I updated my original Hitachi 320GB to a 500GB Hitachi 7K500, then next year to a Seagate Momentus 750GB. Each succesive upgrade increased the beachball frequency. Then finally, a few weeks ago I upgraded to a Seagate ST1000LM014 1TB hybrid SSD and things became intolerable with beachballs hanging and freezing my system every hour or so that required cycling power to recover. I kept reducing software, turning off Bluetooth, increasing fans speed, trying to eliminate what the problem was not and hope it might reveal the problem. Nothing worked until I ran accross Kempton Lam's video that mentioned the SATA HD jumper.

Unfortunately I do not think other hard drive manufactures such as Western Digital ( WD ) implement a SATA drive jumper to slow it down to SATA I 1.5 Gbit/seconds . For non-Seagate drives I am afraid MacBook Pro 2008 users could be out of luck unless the manufactures support a firmware utility to configure their drives to reduce speed to SATA I.

-Ed

Hi Mike,

I am not sure it is same issue if drive is not even recognized. But I would not give up hope. I know my late 2008 MacBookPro5,1 has this problem even though it was designed to work at SATA II 3 Gbit/second. It may be possible that your 2009 model has a similar issue.

If the jumper works for you, then please cut and paste your MacBook's Hardware Overview. It would be nice to see the Serial-ATA hardware too. Go to:

1. Apple icon
2. About This Mac
3. More Info
4. System Report

My late 2008 is:

Hardware Overview:

Model Name: MacBook Pro

Model Identifier: MacBookPro5,1

Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo

Processor Speed: 2.4 GHz

Number of Processors: 1

Total Number of Cores: 2

L2 Cache: 3 MB

Memory: 8 GB

Bus Speed: 1.07 GHz

Boot ROM Version: MBP51.007E.B06

SMC Version (system): 1.33f8

Serial Number (system): 73******1G0

Hardware UUID: ****

Sudden Motion Sensor:

State: Enabled

Serial-ATA

NVidia MCP79 AHCI:

Vendor: NVidia

Product: MCP79 AHCI

Link Speed: 3 Gigabit

Negotiated Link Speed: 3 Gigabit

Description: AHCI Version 1.20 Supported

-Ed

<Edited By Host>

The info is only useful if the jumper fixed the problem. If you cannot boot up must have a unrelated problem.

Is it even seeing the disk? Is there an OS installed?

-Ed

Hopefully your posted computer info may help other MacBook Pro users. I'd hate for anyone spend as much time suffering with this problem as I did.

Now we know the late 2008 MacBookPro5,1 and 2009 MacBookPro5,5 have issues with SATA II 3 Gbit/second and in particular with this Seagate hybrid drive.

-Ed

Mike,

I understood. The jumper worked. Very good news.

I have to run mine with a jumper as well. I had similar beachball problems with other upgrades of non-Seagate drives that I suspect were caused by the same problem. At least Seagate hybrids have the jumper option. Other drives do not.

I have been considering a used i7 MacBook Pros that I could populate with 16GB RAM. Hopefully this problem no longer existed in anything with an i7 and also had Thunderbolt.

Thanks for sharing your story so that others may find it someday,

-Ed