[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>