Apple Macbook Pro Firmware Fritzes Third-party Hdds

[Peaches]

Apple MacBook Pro firmware fritzes third-party HDDs

Fast Sata drives fail post patch

By Chris Mellor

26th June 2009 09:30 GMT

Apple's firmware upgrade, which restores the 3Gb/s Sata link speed to MacBook Pros, has also caused some 'unauthorised' hard drives to fail.

An Apple Discussion board thread has 65 comments about the issue, which may occur when the Apple-shipped drive in the MacBook Pro is replaced with a third-party drive and the fast Sata firmware upgrade is applied.

One poster, Ian Burrell, first noticed the issue with a WD Scorpio Blue drive. His MacBook Pro froze randomly and he suggested that there were intermittent data errors. Unfortunately, there seemed to be no way to revert to the previous firmware and so recover from the problem.

A poster called Whaleface, with a WD SCorpio Black, wrote: "No disk access can happen at all for 20-30 seconds, then usage spikes, then no disk access at all."

Another poster found his Intel X25-M solid-state drive worked before the update but not afterwards. Andrew Myers wrote: "I would like to add that I'm experiencing the same thing as the above users. I am using the Intel x25-M. This is terrible, the laptop is near-unusable."

More details theregister - http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/06/26/ma..._drive_failure/

[iccaros]

This why Apple did not want to fix this issue.. not all SATA drive for laptops can operate at the higher speed. Also intel chip sets are known for not being backwards compliant.

[jcl]

The Scorpio and X25-M are SATA 3 Gbit/s drives. The X25-M practically requires 3 Gbit/s.