Best COMPATIBLE ssd for NVidia MCP79 chipset?

Try Crucial M500 SSDs and possibly Samsung 840 Pro SSDs.

I tried to upgrade a friend's late-2008 MBP with an Intel 520 Series SSD and it would not boot into OS X Mavericks when installed in the MBP. The drive could be seen and maintained when I booted from an external drive. Also, when I could see the drive, it showed the same Linked Speed and Negotiated Link Speed as you're seeing with your Toshiba SSD.

I had a new Crucial M500 SSD that I tried and it worked great showing 3Gbps Linked and Negotiated. And it was bootable when installed in the MBP. So, I used that one.

Bottom line, as you've noticed, some brand SSDs don't play nice with the nVidia chipset.

I was maybe unclear about this...

You can set a jumper on the WD Blue HD to force it in 3Gbps. That would have solved the fact that it did not always negotiate at 3G. But since I have now the SSD in the HDD tray, I have the nice WD Blue on my desk...

I guess my screenshot was removed because I left the serial on it. Here is it again without it -- hopefully this should be good.

Here's the tested result. This works pretty well.

I've found that I like to send business to Crucial, because they have a decent upgrade selector that will give you an answer on what works with your mac.

Johan-Kr

In case someone want to search for alternative, I just bought a Transcend SSD (http://id.transcend-info.com/Products/No-735) for my Macbook Late 2008 with Nvidia MCP79 chipset, and OS X Yosemite. I got full speed (3gb) link without any problem. I can see on the website that they support Apple Product pretty well, there's a combo pack that helps apple user (http://www.transcend-info.com/apple/jetdrive420/)! I also enable the trim force. The blackmagic disk speed test result is around 206mbps for write and 260mbps for read, I'm happy so far, booting only need 6-10 seconds.

There even seem to be differences among MacBooks and iMacs using the same MCP79 chipset. It appears to be hard to really predict whether an SSD will work at full SATAII speed or not since I've already read different statements on whether Crucial's BX100, BX200 and MX200 work at 3Gbits or not. As it seems, some MacBook (Pros) are less problematic than iMacs.

Today, I received my 275GB Crucial MX300 and it works flawlessly in my Late 2008 Macbook Alu Unibody in contrast to the two iMacs mentioned before. So you might as well wanna give it a try in case you own a MacBook/Pro since it is even cheaper (at least here in Germany) that the BX200 and way faster in terms of sequential writing speed for large amounts of data.

I just swapped out the stock HD on my 2009 Macbook Pro (5,4) for a 120GB Sandisk SSD Plus (model SDSSDA-120G-G26), enabled TRIM, cleared PRAM, and it's running 3 gigabit from the jump. Looks like this new model doesn't use that dreaded sandforce controller that seems to be giving people fits.

The 2009 firmware update for the iMac9,1 pertains to the video card. Furthermore, I already had it installed (yes, I checked just now).

iMac EFI Firmware Update 1.4

I then performed an SMC and PRAM resets just now, as per this:

iMac SMC and PRAM reset

Upon rebooting my iMac9,1 and running the Black Magic Disk Speed Test, I found that I am still getting slow SATA-I speeds.

Again, this is so strange. The MBP5,5 has the same NVidia chipset, yet the iMac9,1 gets SATA-I while the MBP5,5 gets SATA-II, both with the same exact SSD and same disk contents!!

There are other caveats to RAID as well:

OS X: "Some features of Mac OS X are not supported for the disk (volume name)" appears during installation - Apple Suppo…

So if you install a single SSD in the HDD slot of a 2009 iMac11,1 you would only get SATA-II 3G speed but you can use FileVault and the Recovery partition.

Since no one in this thread gave the courtesy of a reply to nullterminator, I post my own query with skepticism that I will fair any better. But I won't know if I don't try, so here it goes...

It's now November 2015. I have the following 3 Macs in need of 1TB SSDs:

• MacBook Pro 5,5 (June 2009)
• iMac 9,1 (March 2009)
• iMac 11,1 (October 2009, QuadCore 2.8GHz)

NOTE: Both iMacs above will need the NewerTech AdaptaDrive 2.5" to 3.5" mounting bracket. And the Late 2009 iMac will also need an Inline Thermal Sensor Kit (when mounting an SSD in the hard drive slot.

All 3 Macs listed above are SATA II (3Gb/s). The 5,5 and 9,1 use the buggy Nvidia MCP79 controller that does not play well with most 6G (SATA III) SSDs, insofar as it will stupidly drop speeds down to SATA I (1.5Gb/s). (I don't know the late 2009 i7's SATA controller because I don't have the machine in front of me now, but supposedly it is NOT the MCP79 controller. Even so, I don't know about compatibility with SATA III 6G SSDs.)

I read every post in this thread. People are saying the Crucial M500 should work at 3Gb/s speeds. But does that apply to ALL in the M500 series? Are some capacities of the M500 incompatible (i.e., will they drop down the 1.5Gb/s speeds)?

So why this question? Because prices have come down. Let's face it. If you can get 1TB of storage for a reasonable price, you're going to do it. So I specifically want to know about 1TB Crucial M500 drives such as this:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2455734,00.asp

Currently, you get 1TB for $345. A pretty amazing price. But is it 3Gb/s-compatible with the 2009 Macs I listed above?

Lastly... Yes, I am aware of the OWC Mercury Electra 3G 960GB. But there are 2 problems with it right now: (1) The 3G 960GB about twice the price of the 6G 960GB SSD sold by OWC, and (2) the 3GB 960GB is reported to be much, much slower than most other SSDs of the same category. That's really the only reason I am investigating SSDs that are not from OWC.

To be clear, SATA 3 is 6gbps, SATA 2 is 3gbps, and SATA 1 is 1.5gbps. It sounds like you have SATA 1. You don't say which specific MBP you have, so we aren't going to be able to verify that. Often the drive will negotiate downwards, but the SATA cable is marginal and the increased demand of an SSD shows up as a failure, so it could be your SATA cable that's the issue.

The way to think about drive speed is Bottleneck Analysis. As long as the connection methods are faster than the Drives, there will be no appreciable slowdown.

All single rotating and SSD drives available today and most Arrays are MUCH slower than SATA-2, PCIe, or ThunderBolt, so there will be no real-world slowdown.

"A chain is only as strong as its WEAKEST Link", and a drive is only as fast as its SLOWEST connection. In this case, that is the speed at which the data spins under the read heads, or the access time of an SSD. At this writing, these are all quite a bit slower than the Busses available. So there will be no real-world difference in where you attach those drives.

RE: SATA Bus speed:

SATA 3 is rated at 6G bits/sec, which theoretically is about 750 Mega Bytes/sec

SATA 2 is rated at 3G bits/sec, which is theoretically about 375 Mega Bytes/sec

SATA 1 is rated at 1.5G bits/sec, which is theoretically about 187.5 Meg Bytes/sec

Rotating drives available today, whatever their SATA spec, can source data off the spinning platters no faster than about 125MBytes/sec.

None of the SATA Busses is a bottleneck for consumer Rotating drives you can buy today. Trying to speed up the SATA Bus will not provide any real-world performance increases for Rotating Drives.

Even MOST common SSD drives are not bottlenecked by SATA 2.

>> If you have a faster SSD Data drive, consider mounting it on a PCIe card that features SATA-3 slots, but it may not be bootable from there.

There are no superfast PCIe-direct devices available today (except inside Apple computers), but rumors suggest we may see some in 2014.

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I have an OWC Mercury Electra 3G SSD installed in a 2009 PowerBook. It has a link speed of 3 Gbps and a negotiated link speed of 3 GBps. I purchased it from OWC (macsales.com) because very often in this forum people praise OWC and Crucial.com for their Mac-compatible parts and service.

I decided to upgrade my 2009 Macbook with Nvidia MCP79 chipset last month. The first drive I tried was the SanDisk Extreme II. That one was incompatible so I returned it and bought the Crucial M500. I've sinces spent the last 3 weeks trying to make it work properly. Right out of the box I had trouble cloning my original Apple 128GB SSD while connected to my laptop. Using a couple different external USB/SATA adapters to clone the drive proved to be impossible with the Macbook. So, I tried a clean install of OS X to the M500. It would not take the install if I was using my Macbook to do it. This was true whether the drive was internal or external at the time of install. I even tried using my original Leapord disk that came with the system and even that would not sucessfully install on the M500.

I eventually got an OS installed on it by using a different computer and external enclosure. After placing that inside my Macbook everything seemed fine. After 3 days the computer began to lag and drive errors starting popping up. Verifying/repairing permissions in disk utility failed with "open error 5" reports for multiple items. Attempting a disk verify/repair also failed. Booting with a system on a USB flash drive and using disk utility on the M500 also failed. By removing the drive and reconnecting it to a different computer I was able to repair it file structure on the drive. However, after a few hours the same problems returned.

Crucial advised that I update the firmware on the SSD. I did that and started with a fresh install on the drive after doing a secure 3 pass erase. Again I had to install the OS on a seperate system and then install the drive in the Macbook. Again after 3 days the system became unstable.

I've returned the drive as defective. However, the problems seemed to be related to using it in the Macbook. I could install the OS using a newer iMac, but not the 2009 Macbook 5,3 with Nvidia MCP79 chipset. I put the original drive back in with a fresh OS install and everything is working flawlessly exactly as it was before I tried using the M500.

It could be that the drive I had was defective. It appeared to work fine for several days then slowly became unusable to the point that it couldn't even boot anymore. Yet, taking it out and connecting it to a different computer seemed to restore it to working condition again for a few days. I'm curious to know if the other people reporting the M500 as compatible with the Nvidia MCP79 chipset had problems days to weeks after installing the M500.

There are two difficulties that could be contributing to your difficulty.

Some of the recent MacBook Pro models are seeing a rash of Internal Hard Drive cable problems. These show themselves not as outright failures, but as flaky unreliable operation. At faster transfer speeds, such as using an SSD, they are worse. Since booting from a drive is much more intensive than simply reading files off a drive, these sometimes install OK, and sometimes even seem to be OK when checked with Target disk Mode from another Mac.

Anecdotally, the worst of these seem to be the 2009 models. But others are not trouble-free.

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The other issue has to do with an SSD's inability to unload deleted data. The OS never tells a Non-Apple SSD what data are being deleted, so the SSD must continue to track, move, and re-organize data that are no longer needed. This can cause an SSD to slow down and even become dysfunctional while Mac OS X says there are still lots of blocks it calls "Free". This article explains the back story:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM

TRIM Enabler by groths has been widely used to get better results from non-Apple SSDs. Apple has not provided a mechanism that allows more elegant support of TRIM on third-party SSD drives.

So this (and others like it) requires setting aside an Apple module and replacing it with a patched version. Apple has not chosen to allow drive Vendors to qualify their drives, and has not left the names of qualified drives in a config file where they could be modified without changing the code itself.

The symptoms you list for non-apple SSD TRIM support do sound like the problems I experienced. Except, I did have TRIM turned on with the Crucial M500. That was the first thing I did after I got it up and running in the Macbook.

The bad cable symptoms also match mine, but I was exchanging an SSD for a larger SSD and the speed difference was probably not critical. Also, I had issues with the Crucial M500 even when attached to the MBP through an external USB enclosure.

Other people have had similar problems with Crucial drives that require doing regular power cycles to restore functionality. A power cycle involves removing the drive and attaching it to a power source without connecting it to the drive controller. After letting it idle in that state for 20 minutes the drive is powered down for another 30. This cycle is repeated a few times and then the drive will be good to go again. However, this solution is temporary and I've found reports from several Crucial SSD users stating that the power cycle fix becomes a weekly, or even daily, routine to maintain drive functianality. This seems to be a production defect of some Crucial drives. I returned mine as soon as it became clear it could not maintain integrity for more than a few days at a time without being removed from the MBP.