Solid-State Drives (SSD)

[shareef777]

I've since swapped out my drive for one with the 1571 firmware, and my sleep issue has gone away.

[BobRudge]

This isn't a general thread about running the SSD in a Mac or sleep issues etc. It'll help everyone if it stays on topic

[shareef777]

**bleep** are you talking about? Your first post to this thread is about freezing issues, NOT about getting your drive recognized. Try not to be so hypocritical in your posts next time!

[ramam]

It was about the last thing I wanted to do but I RMA'd my Crucial SSD. I could not get it to work with my June 2009 MBP 17" - there is no firmware downgrade option (to disable SATA II) so I could not use it. From what I've read at the Apple site it is conceivable that replacing the motherboard will yield success. Let me know when you guys figure out what the problem is as I'm dying to get an SSD in my development machine (yes I develop on an MBP)!

[jos]

This one's a bit odd. I have my SSD (Crucial CT256M225) installed in my mid-2009 MacBook Pro. After some initial bumpiness, I now have the system working properly: no beachballs, no hanging, no general issues, stable computer running Snow Leopard. Here's my hardware summary:

  Model Name:    MacBook Pro
  Model Identifier:    MacBookPro5,3
  Processor Name:    Intel Core 2 Duo
  Processor Speed:    2.66 GHz
  Number Of Processors:    1
  Total Number Of Cores:    2
  L2 Cache:    3 MB
  Memory:    4 GB
  Bus Speed:    1.07 GHz
  Boot ROM Version:    MBP53.00AC.B03
  SMC Version (system):    1.48f2

The process of getting to this point was a little torturous (downgrade to 1.6 EFI, re-upgrade to 1.7 EFI, disable Sudden Motion Sensor, sacrifice chicken, etc.), but like I said, I haven't had any hanging issues with this setup since that point. There's only one oddity: if I ping the drive with smartctl, my CRC error count is steadily increasing in little hops. At the moment it's at 10066 (the large number probably a result of the early bumpiness), and appears to be adding a few errors every few minutes or so (perhaps 50 per workday unless I move large files around). Is this normal and I can ignore it if I'm not seeing any issues, or should I be worried?

For what it's worth, the error count jumps significantly when doing heavy disk activity, but I don't see any other issues; I've even tried copying large files and running various cryptographic checksums and haven't seen any differences.

[pieteromvlee]

I have about the same hardware summary as the previous post. I'm running a mid 2.88Ghz MBP and I bought an 128GB drive. Installation initially went fine, but I got the spinning beach ball just before the end. Only thing left to do was a hard reboot.

After that everything seemed to work fine however about half an hour later I got the beach ball again and again a force reboot was everything I could do. After that it didn't want to startup at all, and it got stuck in the gray startup screen.

Sometimes I got the gray screen, sometimes indefinitely the apple logo and the progress indicator, and sometimes the 'forbidden' sign.

I managed to start up from the DVD and using disk utility I found out that there was no hard drive to be found; the column on the left only displayed the dvd itself. It seemed that the drive was not seen at all.

So I opened the MBP again and check if the cable was connected well. It seemed to, so I closed the laptop again and rebooted; that worked. Inevitably 5 minutes later again the spinning beach ball and after that I was stuck again in the gray launch screen.

I replaced it again with the normal hard drive and that works fine so the problem really lies with the drive.

Personally I would think it's a bad connection, or the cable gets loose somehow.

I have no idea how to up/downgrade EFI or what the current version is. I'm running Snow Leopard by the way.

Help would be very much appreciated

[ramam]

Return the crucial drive. As it stands the newer MBPs don't support SATA II (SATA 2). EFI 1.7 enabled SATA II and came with the warning that it won't work for everyone. It seems Apple new SATA II wasn't an option with the new MBPs - I don't understand why Crucial wouldn't be open about this but I get that Apple doesn't want to deal with a 100,000 exchanges. Bummer - two companies I like both messing me up on the same issue