Defective OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G?

Just received my OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G today, after waiting 4 weeks and a promised delivery date of May 11. I also bought a data doubler + external enclosure for my optical drive from maxupgrades.com.

I've been dying to get this thing. Since I had nothing else to do but wait, I've been pouring over forums and blogs to know what to expect when installing this in my 2011 17" MBP. My serial indicates my laptop was built in late April (I just bought it 2 weeks ago), and from what I've read, the later builds do not have the SATA III issues. Even so, I've been on pins and needles waiting to see if this ridiculously expensive purchase will have any of the dreaded issues many 2011 MBP owners have experienced with SATA III compatibility.

I installed the drive in the main SATA III bay, leaving the optical drive in so I could install Windows 7 afterward (since Windows 7 can't be installed from an external drive). To my utter dismay, when booting up the OSX install disc and into Disk Utility -- alas, the drive wasn't there.

So then, reluctantly, I applied the OWC cable shielding kit. Booted again. No dice. At this point, I figured I was among the unlucky souls to acquire a non-working 6G link speed.

Knowing that the Mercury Extreme 6G will work without issue in the optibay (aside from 3G link speeds), I decided to put it there, since there wasn't any alternative (and to see if the drive was possibly broken). After the pain in the ass task of installing it, I boot again (this time with the stock 750GB drive in the main slot), and yet again, Disk Utility is still not recognizing the drive.

Now, am I stupid, am I doing something wrong, or is this drive dead? Is there something I should do before getting an exchange from OWC?

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How can I format it when Disk Utility won't recognize it?

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To update, I can see the Mercury Extreme in the system profiler when using the OSX install disc, but not Disk Utility. However, when booted into OSX from the stock drive, the Mercury Extreme does not appear in the system profiler (nor Disk Utility).

ecstacy, I was actually able to get the drive bootable into the OS. I think it has to do with our install discs (maybe).

After updating OSX on my secondary drive (which I hadn't done previously yet, like an idiot. I was fed up and didn't think it would make a difference), the drive finally appeared in Disk Utility. But like you I wasn't able to get OSX onto it. If you use Carbon Copy Cloner, you can clone your secondary drive to the SSD and, voila, you'll be able to boot to it. Hopefully Lion install disc won't have this problem so we won't have to clone our secondary drives to get a bootable OS on it.

On another note, I moved the SSD back to my main bay to test the SATA III, and I'm bummed to report high speeds but frequent hangs/beachballs. Looks like I'm one of the unlucky ones to get a bad SATA III port.

Also, the OWC shielding kit didn't work for me. When applied, it took nearly 5 minutes to boot up. When finally booted, I got 500MB/s+ write speeds and around 120MB/s read speeds with constant hangs. Without it, I get around 487MB/s write and 436MB/s reads when it's not hanging, which is about every 5 minutes.

Tried installing Windows 7 to see if possibly this is an OSX problem, but the instillation keeps failing at various points throughout the process, never getting past the "installing updates" phase during the initial instillation. I'm going to try to get my hands on another Windows 7 install disc to see maybe mine is the problem, but at this point my hopes aren't very high.

I'm going to look into getting a replacement, even though it's still a roll of the dice. According to reports and production dates, my MBP shouldn't be affected (built in late April), yet it is. If none of this works out, I'll be biting the bullet and putting it in the optibay, as that's my only option if I want to use this thing

What I meant was I booted into an older version of OSX on my secondary drive and hadn't done a software update so it wasn't seeing the SSD until I did.

It's not a bum drive. It's just my MBP has problems with SATA III, which is common.

You could probably RAID 0 your drives if you install OSX on an external USB hard drive and do all the work through that, then Carbon Copy Clone that drive to your array once its setup. I've never done that but it sounds like it should work. Glad to see you're up and running though man!

I've read about people doing it before and after a quick Google search I found instructions on how to do it:

http://www.maciverse.com/installing-snow-leopard-onto-an-external-hard-drive.html

I talked to OWC early morning Tuesday about this issue, so maybe their knowledge of the issue hasn't circulated through the company yet. Both of us have told them, and I can't see how there aren't more out there that have the same issue as us. What was great though is they told me that it's possible the drive is defective, and if I want they will send me an advanced replacement so I could get it in a couple days. Great company, OWC is.

Did you make sure you updated OS X on your external install?

Guy, what MBP do you have? Are you having any issues with hangs/beachballs? I am

Could you enter your serial in this site http://www.chipmunk.nl/klantenservice/applemodel.html and tell me your generation, build week, and factory?

Also, OWC highly recommends against enabling TRIM with their drives. I would listen to them.

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In the drop down menu try the 4K resolution image size and 16GB file size and you'll probably see faster speeds. That's where I see around 500mb. Would be awesome if it was consistent and didn't hang every 5min though.

Check your speeds again after a couple days of consistent use. Every time I do the AJA benchmark they seem to get faster for me. Even so, your speeds are wicked fast. I wouldn't be complaining. I would gladly take your machine over mine since I can't even use mine reliably.