[Solved] Beachballs on late 2008 15" MacBook Pro MacBookPro5,1 with SATA II HD
Each time I upgraded hard disks in my late 2008 15" MacBook Pro ( MacBookPro5,1 ) I experienced increasing beachballs. The worst was my recent upgrade to a Seagate 1TB SSD hybrid drive.
I had lived with this pain for years and it appears a simple jumper change could have solved it. In my opinion all or at least some models of the late 2008 MacBook 15" Pros do not reliably support SATA II 3 Gbit/second.
See jumper diagram for Seagate drives. Note the diagram is showing drive laying hard disk circuit board side up. Other manufacturers may differ.
http://knowledge.seagate.com/article...language=en_US
From what I uderstand my late 2008 MacBook Pro was designed to support SATA II 3 Gbit/second with it's Nvidia chip set. In fact every model from late 2008 appears to have support for SATA II.
Then in early 2011 they added support for SATA III 6 Gbit/sec which the 1TB ST1000LM014 hybrid drive also supports. ( Hopefully they got SATA III right in their first 2011 model year. ) Unfortunately for me I do not think they got SATA II right in their first late 2008 model year.
I hope this may help someone avoid the pain I experienced,
-EdOfTheMountain
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
ST1000LM014-1EJ164:
Capacity: 1 TB (1,000,204,886,016 bytes)
Model: ST1000LM014-1EJ164
Revision: SM11
Serial Number: W3804LD1
Native Command Queuing: Yes
Queue Depth: 32
Removable Media: No
Detachable Drive: No
BSD Name: disk0
Rotational Rate: 5400
Medium Type: Rotational
Partition Map Type: GPT (GUID Partition Table)
S.M.A.R.T. status: Verified
Volumes:
disk0s1:
Capacity: 209.7 MB (209,715,200 bytes)
BSD Name: disk0s1
Content: EFI
ST-1TB:
Capacity: 999.86 GB (999,860,912,128 bytes)
Available: 130.51 GB (130,505,502,720 bytes)
Writable: Yes
File System: Journaled HFS+
BSD Name: disk0s2
Mount Point: /
Content: Apple_HFS
<Edited By Host>
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.5), Seagate 1TB hybrid ST1000LM0