Samsung 850 EVO in Early Macbook Pro

How did you go with this? I'm using the same macbook pro and have had an EVO 840 with great success - how'd you go with the 850? keen to know!

Haven't done the trim process. A friend of mine did it and had problems after. Various shutdowns without any reason

Hi Maca_lescour

I have the exact same problem with the new 850. I was having odd crashes every now and then, going into the white screen says problems and press any key to restart.... I tried different things including verify and repair disk but the problem keeps coming back. And a few days ago it finally stopped working and stuck at booting screen and that's it... I tried to boot into recovery mode to repair the disk but it said can not be repaired... 😟 my disk is in the primary slot... I don't know what's the problem and what I should do. Have you figured it out yet? Any suggestions? Thank you!

All of my issues with the 850 SSD turned out to be a bad SATA cable. It appears that the SSD is less tolerant of faulty cables than a regular HDD. After replacing the SATA cable, it worked fine.

Yep I had the same experience - all the major issues re booting, installation, I/O errors like files unable to be copied to external drives/USB etc - everything was related to the SATA cable. Had them replace it at the Apple store and now every things working as it should.

Apparently the SATA cables in MacBooks aren't designed to run as efficiently with 3rd party SSD's - typically you've got 1.5-2 years of use before the SATA cable will stop working (or will have the errors mentioned above) if using a non-Apple SSD.

Thank you etpapple and olePigeon!

Is it possible to ask the staff at apple store to replace the SATA cable for me? It's an old early 2011 macbook pro and I've upgraded the ram and ssd. I've heard that they won't even touch it if you've done something yourself...

That's what I had heard as well - but they were very accommodating and didn't mention it once (that I had put in a non-Apple SSD). Get it done!

Okay. Will do.

Thank you and sorry for the trivial questions 😝

If it is a user-servicable part like the drive, the reason they will likely give is not "we did not replace the drive". The reason they would likely give is "we are not responsible for your data/system on that drive, just for the cable" ... this is just based on my experience at the Genius Bar. You decide if the very small risk is worth not putting the original drive back.

I see! Thanks!

Although another thing which may not be really related, but I used to be able to copy files to an external hard drive that's not mac formatted. Now I can't do it anymore, even create a new folder on them. Is it just the new OS Yosemite? Or it's related to the cable problem(which seems quite unlikely lol)? Because I saw in etpapple mentioned that IO problems may due to the cable also...

Macs cannot "by default" write to non-GPT except for ExFAT. If you were writing to NTFS, you must have been using some software that is not compatible with Yosemite. Check application compatibility at http://roaringapps.com/apps.

steve359 - yep that sounds about right. It is a very small risk though, and like I'd mentioned since replacing the SATA cable everything has worked as it should - they charged around $54US (although I'm sure it's cheaper if you DIY it and buy the part through Ebay, but time took precedence over the cost in my case).

In terms of copying files - this seems to be one of the other 'symptoms' of a bad SATA cable - I had the same problem. It's actually an I/O problem, because the cable is failing, it's not able to read/write files correctly, so you get those error messages. Not related to the OS in my experience.

That's a reasonable price. You'd save about $20 if you did it yourself, but you have to be very careful with the cable. There are two spots to bend the cable, and one of them is NOT over the corner of DVD drive. If you bend it there, it'll likely break the cable, and a lot of inexperience technicians will bend it flush around the DVD drive. The cable may protrude a bit, but it'll be flattened down without creasing when you put the bottom of the case back on. You only bend it where there two screws go. You'll also want to wait until the last minute to remove the sticky tape, as once that cable is stuck to the case, it's not going anywhere, and you'll likely damage it if you try to pry it back off to reposition it.

Don't forget that it's also the IR cable, so be careful when removing it. You can break the little connector on the IR board (it's very tiny and very fragile.)

SOS.

I have installed a samsung 850 evo on my sisters macbook pro (mid 2012). It worked fine until yesterday that she can't boot it. She said me that she gets a screen with a folder with a question mark at the center of the screen. What she can do to make it book?

Thanks

You should have made a separate post for this. As you would get more help that way.This post has to do with the internal drive cable, which may or may not be your problem. The flashing question mark means your computer can't find the drive or a startup drive. You can boot to recovery,if it will. by Command R at startup and run the utilities to check/repair the drive. If you cannot get to there,then it is possible the drive or the cable is bad. To check the drive you would need an external inclosure to put it into and then try to boot to it. You could also try a pram reset. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7438338?answerId=29704192022#29704192022&ac_cid=tw123456