HuntsMan75

Q: Replace Hard Drive with SSD

System Info: MacBook Pro running OS X 10.9, mid 2009, 13", PN MB991LL/A (2.53 GHz), 8GB RAM

 

I started having some problems with my system, mainly slow downs, especially when using Safari. I got a copy of Scannerz (http://scsc-online.com/Scannerz.html) and it confirmed drive platter damage. I know some of these units are supposed to have cable problems but Scannerz tested that too and found no problems with the cable, so this is a bonafide drive problem (it's 6 years old, you know).

 

I'd like to go ahead and replace it with an SSD and have some questions:

 

  1. Maybe I'm getting models mixed up but I seem to remember something about a drive thermal sensor on Apples not being compatible with generic drives. I know I read that somewhere I just don't remember where?
  2. I assume, if #1 above isn't a problem, that I can basically use any SATA SSD. Now I know I should get the fastest interface possible, but are there any caveats or incompatibilities that some brands of SSDs may present?
  3. What about stuff like trim and wear leveling. WIll this be in a driver for the SSD or does the OS take care of it automatically?
  4. Are there any brands/models to stay away from?
  5. Should I replace the cable too? I've heard they can get bad.

 

Thanks in advance.

MacBook Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9.5)

Posted on Apr 4, 2015 12:06 PM

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Q: Replace Hard Drive with SSD

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  • by R.K.Orion,

    R.K.Orion R.K.Orion Apr 28, 2015 1:31 PM in response to Csound1
    Level 1 (14 points)
    Apr 28, 2015 1:31 PM in response to Csound1

    Well, you can probably find them somewhere on the web for $5.00, but will they be any good? I'd prefer to pay the extra and get it from a source that has something at stake in the game, like iFixit, OWC, or Apple. I know they'll cost more, but at least you know they're real companies.

     

    By the way I'm not implying that the Amazon source you found is bad, I'm just stating my own preferences and opinions.

     

    I bought a replacement battery on Amazon that had hundreds of 'stellar' ratings and it was junk. I had to return it at my expense three times and then gave up. Shortly thereafter the company disappeared. I get the impression some of these guys pay a third party company to post hundreds of 'stellar' reviews of their products on the web just to get people to buy the product, they unload it, then disappear. I know this sort of thing was a problem on ebay some time ago…maybe it still is.

  • by Csound1,

    Csound1 Csound1 Apr 28, 2015 1:35 PM in response to R.K.Orion
    Level 9 (50,801 points)
    Desktops
    Apr 28, 2015 1:35 PM in response to R.K.Orion

    I have used those cables in the last 6 Macs I have installed an SSD in, I don't read reviews, I do it for myself.

     

    Check my profile for the list, everything non retina has had it's cables changed.

  • by R.K.Orion,

    R.K.Orion R.K.Orion Apr 28, 2015 3:20 PM in response to Csound1
    Level 1 (14 points)
    Apr 28, 2015 3:20 PM in response to Csound1

    Thanks for the source! If I need them in the future I'll know where to go.

  • by Csound1,

    Csound1 Csound1 Apr 28, 2015 3:19 PM in response to R.K.Orion
    Level 9 (50,801 points)
    Desktops
    Apr 28, 2015 3:19 PM in response to R.K.Orion

    Your welcome

  • by ThomasB2010,

    ThomasB2010 ThomasB2010 Apr 29, 2015 3:58 AM in response to dwb
    Level 1 (13 points)
    Apr 29, 2015 3:58 AM in response to dwb

    dwb wrote:

     

    ThomasB2010 wrote:

     

    Most HD's fail slowly giving the user time to pull their stuff off.

    Would you like to back this up with statistics? Do HHDs fail slowly? They can, sure. But they also die quickly and with no warning, especially when they are in a portable computer.

     

    What needs clarification is the term "fail slowly." To me that means over a period of days or weeks. I base my comments on nothing more than personal experience. I have no statistics other than personal observations to back me up.

     

    To me, "fail slowly" could be a drive developing bad sectors, which can occur for a hard drive several times over  a period of years, or a drive that starts making periodic noises that typically get worse over a period of time, usually days or even weeks. To me, this is a slow failure.

     

    Most failures that I've experienced that aren't head crash related usually show typical symptoms, like abnormal noises, and I mean really abnormal noises like squeals or grinding sounds. If people listen to their drives, and I suspect a lot don't, or if they hear a one-off sound that seems peculiar to them, they just discard it, when in fact it's a sign of a drive about to die, usually from a mechanical failure.

     

    I've only seen one drive drop dead for no apparent reason. I've learned from experience to listen for the signs of failure, and if present, regardless of what SMART monitoring reports, the drive goes. SMART monitoring doesn't seem to be that good to me. A squealing drive is a dying drive, even if it's only a burst that lasts a split second. I've seen this several times. If the noises can be traced to the drive the drive is dying. SMART will often not report anything about these types of problems.

     

    That's been my experience and that's what I'm basing my comments on.

  • by dwb,

    dwb dwb Apr 29, 2015 8:47 AM in response to ThomasB2010
    Level 7 (24,226 points)
    Notebooks
    Apr 29, 2015 8:47 AM in response to ThomasB2010

    I've worked in the tech field for more than 20 years and my experience doesn’t match yours. The refrain I hear (about computers in general) is: “It was working fine yesterday!” My opinion of SMART had always been that when it reported imminent failure it was right - back up now! But it under reports. That impression was confirmed by a report published about 2 years ago by a Google researcher. In talking to the poor souls who have brought their computer to me for repair I've often heard things that screamed: hard drive failure on the way. But that’s years of experience in the field talking and I wouldn’t necessarily expect a typical user to pick up on those things and associate them with drive failure. But we’re here at the MacBook Pro area and that adds an even bigger likelihood of sudden drive failure. The failure caused by someone bumping the computer while it is reading or writing data, the dropped computer, and the ever popular spilling a drink on the computer.

     

    But really this is all beside the point. The real point is drives die and they die whether they are mechanical, flash, SSD, and I'm sure in the future when they are holographic or whatever they will still crash. Backing up is crucial and the most backups you have the safer your data is from loss.

  • by Csound1,

    Csound1 Csound1 Apr 29, 2015 8:50 AM in response to dwb
    Level 9 (50,801 points)
    Desktops
    Apr 29, 2015 8:50 AM in response to dwb

    dwb wrote:

     

    I've worked in the tech field for more than 20 years and my experience doesn’t match yours.

    Neither does mine

    dwb wrote:

     

     

    But really this is all beside the point. The real point is drives die and they die whether they are mechanical, flash, SSD, and I'm sure in the future when they are holographic or whatever they will still crash. Backing up is crucial and the most backups you have the safer your data is from loss.

    +1

  • by ThomasB2010,

    ThomasB2010 ThomasB2010 Apr 29, 2015 12:19 PM in response to dwb
    Level 1 (13 points)
    Apr 29, 2015 12:19 PM in response to dwb

    dwb wrote:

     

    I've worked in the tech field for more than 20 years and my experience doesn’t match yours. The refrain I hear (about computers in general) is: “It was working fine yesterday!” My opinion of SMART had always been that when it reported imminent failure it was right - back up now! But it under reports. That impression was confirmed by a report published about 2 years ago by a Google researcher. In talking to the poor souls who have brought their computer to me for repair I've often heard things that screamed: hard drive failure on the way. But that’s years of experience in the field talking and I wouldn’t necessarily expect a typical user to pick up on those things and associate them with drive failure. But we’re here at the MacBook Pro area and that adds an even bigger likelihood of sudden drive failure. The failure caused by someone bumping the computer while it is reading or writing data, the dropped computer, and the ever popular spilling a drink on the computer.

     

    But really this is all beside the point. The real point is drives die and they die whether they are mechanical, flash, SSD, and I'm sure in the future when they are holographic or whatever they will still crash. Backing up is crucial and the most backups you have the safer your data is from loss.

     

    I probably should have clarified my initial comment as being based on my experience. Another factor that may skew my observations is that I've tended to buy  and stick with very few brands. In the old days it was mostly Quantum, which I think was absorbed by Seagate and most recently Hitachi. With new drives being as quiet as they are nowadays, I almost have to wonder if some of the classic noises I've described will even be heard. Another factor for me, and probably more prevalent, has been that a lot of drives are retired while in perfectly good working condition - not because I suspected a problem is or was developing, but rather I needed more space which a bigger drive could provide me with.

     

    If Apple's SMART monitoring reports that the drive is about to fail, my experience has been like yours - it's usually dead within hours. On the other hand, I have a now retired Titanium 667MHz that had a head crash and all the third party SMART programs on the market have reported that it's going to die any minute now, and yet it keeps on working (its been 7 more years.) It a had a serious head crash near the end of the drive, so I partitioned that section out, and the thing is still working to this day, or at least it was the last time I checked. Unfortunately I don't have much use for a 667MHz Titanium running Tiger anymore. The SMART output from the third party applications identifies a more or less massive crash. I took a screen capture of the output and have periodically checked and the damage hasn't gotten any worse. I initially located the bad sectors using TechTool Pro, and later with Scannerz, and they both showed the same regions of the drive as bad. What I did was split the drive into two partitions with the second consisting of the region where the crash occurred, and then I deleted that partition, so it doesn't get accessed anymore. It seems to have worked, but I wouldn't recommend this for anything other than a non-critical unit. All I used that thing for was basic stuff like e-mail. It's browser got to the point it where it was too outdated to display a lot of content. The drive of course now has about 10GB less space, but the trick did work.

     

    Oh well, thanks for your input anyway.

  • by R.K.Orion,

    R.K.Orion R.K.Orion Apr 29, 2015 5:51 PM in response to ThomasB2010
    Level 1 (14 points)
    Apr 29, 2015 5:51 PM in response to ThomasB2010

    ThomasB2010 wrote:

    On the other hand, I have a now retired Titanium 667MHz that had a head crash and all the third party SMART programs on the market have reported that it's going to die any minute now, and yet it keeps on working (its been 7 more years.) It a had a serious head crash near the end of the drive, so I partitioned that section out, and the thing is still working to this day, or at least it was the last time I checked. Unfortunately I don't have much use for a 667MHz Titanium running Tiger anymore. The SMART output from the third party applications identifies a more or less massive crash. I took a screen capture of the output and have periodically checked and the damage hasn't gotten any worse. I initially located the bad sectors using TechTool Pro, and later with Scannerz, and they both showed the same regions of the drive as bad. What I did was split the drive into two partitions with the second consisting of the region where the crash occurred, and then I deleted that partition, so it doesn't get accessed anymore. It seems to have worked, but I wouldn't recommend this for anything other than a non-critical unit. All I used that thing for was basic stuff like e-mail. It's browser got to the point it where it was too outdated to display a lot of content. The drive of course now has about 10GB less space, but the trick did work.

     

    Oh well, thanks for your input anyway.

     

    That's actually sort of a slick trick. By partitioning the bad section out you stop the drive heads from even accessing the bad areas. Supposedly drive crashes leave debris on the platter surface in the vicinity of a crash and when the heads go over them they can continue to scatter the problem. I don't know how practical it would be to do that on a smaller drive with damage somewhere in the middle. You might end up with two usable partitions on one side then a bad section in the middle and managing it might be a PIA.

     

    It might just be easier to get a new drive, but on some old clunker you might end up getting a drive that's worth more than the system.

  • by MrJavaDeveloper,

    MrJavaDeveloper MrJavaDeveloper Apr 30, 2015 11:05 AM in response to R.K.Orion
    Level 1 (64 points)
    Apr 30, 2015 11:05 AM in response to R.K.Orion

    It depends on what the system's worth. I would think drive's with IDE interfaces might be sort of hard to track down at a reasonable price. From what I've seen IDE laptop drives cost as much as SATA drives but with a fraction of the storage. Someone might be interested in getting a SATA/IDE adapter and getting a SATA drive, if there's room in their system for the adapter. For example I seem to recall seeing IDE 2.5" drives with about 80GB of space selling for around $50, while you can get a 500GB SATA drive with much higher rotational speed and a bigger buffer selling for even less.

  • by ThomasB2010,

    ThomasB2010 ThomasB2010 May 1, 2015 11:55 AM in response to R.K.Orion
    Level 1 (13 points)
    May 1, 2015 11:55 AM in response to R.K.Orion

    If the system was newer I would have replaced the drive. When I tested it with Scannerz I had to put it into target disk mode and run the test form my MacBook Pro because Scannerz doesn't run on Tiger. In any case if someone has some old junker or some non-critical system they want to fix and don't want to bother putting any more money into the system, it's worth trying.

     

    Case in point: now the DC-In board has gotten flakey. It's the old type that looks like a stereo connector. To get it to charge you have to play with the positioning and move it around until the charging indicator shows it's charging, and hope it stays there. It's over 10 years old, running an OS that's not updated, Safari can't even open up half the pages on web sites properly because its so old, no other newer browsers are made for it anymore,  the drive already crashed once, and now the DC  in board is flakey. If I was running some sort of computer museum it might be worth fixing, but as-is for me? No.

  • by HuntsMan75,

    HuntsMan75 HuntsMan75 May 1, 2015 6:26 PM in response to ThomasB2010
    Level 1 (14 points)
    May 1, 2015 6:26 PM in response to ThomasB2010

    You should probably clarify that partitioning a section out on a hard drive can't be done on an SSD. If I understand it properly the SSD is emulating a hard drive but actually the blocks in use are often reallocated. For example, to erase a sector on an HDD the drive just marks it as available, but with an SSD it has to first mark it as needing deletion then erase it, usually during a garbage collector session, then it can be written to again. For example during it's first use the SSD may identify the block as, say sector 12344 on the drive but after using, erasing, and putting it back in use, it's sector ID, if that's what its called, then it might be block 3434747, and the next time it happens it gets reassigned again. The difference is, I think, the block locations on an HDD are physical but on an SSD they're virtual.

     

    I hope I said all that right!

  • by ThomasB2010,

    ThomasB2010 ThomasB2010 May 2, 2015 11:15 AM in response to HuntsMan75
    Level 1 (13 points)
    May 2, 2015 11:15 AM in response to HuntsMan75

    You're right, I should have specified it was for hard drives only. The equivalent of an SSD in such a state would probably be a bank of RAM going bad, and I assume the SSD would stop working properly (that's an assumption) if it worked at all.

  • by MrWilliams201,

    MrWilliams201 MrWilliams201 May 4, 2015 3:53 AM in response to HuntsMan75
    Level 1 (14 points)
    May 4, 2015 3:53 AM in response to HuntsMan75

    HuntsMan75 wrote:

     

    I sort of like that dual drive idea, especially with a fully usable partition containing the OS for backup/emergency boot. Just for clarity, this is a MacBook Pro and not something like an Mac Pro tower (the old type that had slots for additional drives, etc.) so I assume that the HDD went into the optical drive's slot. Is that correct, and while I'm at it, would it really matter which device (HDD or SSD) went into which location?

     

    Get one of the Hitachi drives with a 7200RPM spin speed and a 32MB buffer. They use newer high speed technology and they're very fast. Put the HDD into the optical slot and the SSD into the primary drive slot. It's worked for me. Don't miss an optical drive one bit. If I need one I can buy an external for 20 or 30 bucks.

  • by Csound1,

    Csound1 Csound1 May 4, 2015 3:56 AM in response to MrWilliams201
    Level 9 (50,801 points)
    Desktops
    May 4, 2015 3:56 AM in response to MrWilliams201

    Specifically the Hitachi can send about 70MB/s to the bus, an SSD would be about 550 MB/s

     

    The Hitachi is not fast, just large and cheap.

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