macbook pro 13" 2010 + ocz vertex 2 = problems?

[canesalato]

Hello everybody,
I'm reading on the ocz forums that a lot of users are having problems with vertex 2 ssd and the 13" 2010 macbook pro.
With firmware <=1.22 hibernate won't work and osX will go kernel panic if you try to hibernate.
With firmware >= 1.22 the system will slow down, almost hanging for about 20 seconds every few minutes.
Since I was planning on buying this drive, can anybody with a 13" 2010 macbook pro and ocz vertex 2 share his experience?
Thank you =)

 

[stylinexpat]

I have an OCZ Vertex 2 SSD and I have not had any problems. In fact, I have two of them in my 13" MBP running raid. I either shutdown my laptop or just close the lid and either way I have no problems.

 

[Sankersizzle]

Another completely satisfied OCZ Vertex 2 user here. I have never noticed either of those problems. I have a 17" for what it's worth, but I feel like it wouldn't matter in this case.

 

[seydurin]

I have the Vertex two and haven't had any problems. I think I read somewhere that you could see some sleep problems if you use the optibay for a boot partition.

 

[canesalato]

Another completely satisfied OCZ Vertex 2 user here. I have never noticed either of those problems. I have a 17" for what it's worth, but I feel like it wouldn't matter in this case.

Hi, thank you for your feedback. Unfortunately it seems (from what I've read on the ocz forums) that the 2010 13" has a different chipset from 15" and 17" and that chipset is the one that gives the slowdown problem with the ocz (firmware >= 1.22). From what I've heard the firmware 1.11 is not affected, but then hibernation will not work.

Note to everybody: hibernation is not the same thing as sleep. It's the one that saves your data when you are very low on battery.

 

[Sankersizzle]

Hi, thank you for your feedback. Unfortunately it seems (from what I've read on the ocz forums) that the 2010 13" has a different chipset from 15" and 17" and that chipset is the one that gives the slowdown problem with the ocz (firmware >= 1.22). From what I've heard the firmware 1.11 is not affected, but then hibernation will not work.

Note to everybody: hibernation is not the same thing as sleep. It's the one that saves your data when you are very low on battery.

Ah, shucks then. However, I just talked to my buddy who has a V2 in his 13" MBP running the latest firmware and he says he never had an issue sleeping, or hibernating. But he made a note of saying it's only got the opportunity to hibernate less than three times. Hope that helps!

 

[deeddawg]

Another datapoint that would be useful to know is whether those adding a Vertex 2 to a MBP13 are doing a clean install or cloning the existing HDD.

I know next to nothing about OSX as I've not yet bought my MBP13, but a couple decades experience in the Microsoft world suggests that cloning an existing system can sometimes give different results than a bare-metal install.

 

[canesalato]

Ah, shucks then. However, I just talked to my buddy who has a V2 in his 13" MBP running the latest firmware and he says he never had an issue sleeping, or hibernating. But he made a note of saying it's only got the opportunity to hibernate less than three times. Hope that helps!

Yep, you are helping me a lot!
I assume your friend also doesn't have the stuttering problem.
Do you know what firmware he has installed?

 

[skunnykart]

I have tried it and it's currently not very good. I have a MBP 13inch 2010 (7,1) and I bought two vertex2 60gb to have them in raid 0 but...........

1) Tried virgin vertex2 in main bay and optibay with USB dvd drive attached.
Held Option key at startup. Nothing happened. Stuck on blank white screen.

2) Tried vertex 2 in main bay only. Booting into Snow Leopard install disc via USB was successful. Install Successful. But OSX unusable because it stalls every 10-15 minutes for about 20-30 seconds.

3) Added the 2nd vertex2 in the optibay and I was back to the white screen forever.

It seems that only the 13inch MBP 2010 (7,1) is struggling with the vertex 2 according to the ocz forum. Apparently a firmware update is in the works.

Seems to work great in all other Macs, including other versions of the 13inch MBP. Interestingly a guy or girl on the OCZ forum managed to get it working well (minus hibernate) by downgrading to firmware 1.11 or something like that.

Personally I've given up. I have placed them in my windows 7 rig in raid 0 and it's been awesome. I've placed the OWC SSD back into my MBP.

 

[canesalato]

I have tried it and it's currently not very good. I have a MBP 13inch 2010 (7,1) and I bought two vertex2 60gb to have them in raid 0 but...........

1) Tried virgin vertex2 in main bay and optibay with USB dvd drive attached.
Held Option key at startup. Nothing happened. Stuck on blank white screen.

2) Tried vertex 2 in main bay only. Booting into Snow Leopard install disc via USB was successful. Install Successful. But OSX unusable because it stalls every 10-15 minutes for about 20-30 seconds.

3) Added the 2nd vertex2 in the optibay and I was back to the white screen forever.

It seems that only the 13inch MBP 2010 (7,1) is struggling with the vertex 2 according to the ocz forum. Apparently a firmware update is in the works.

Seems to work great in all other Macs, including other versions of the 13inch MBP. Interestingly a guy or girl on the OCZ forum managed to get it working well (minus hibernate) by downgrading to firmware 1.11 or something like that.

Personally I've given up. I have placed them in my windows 7 rig in raid 0 and it's been awesome. I've placed the OWC SSD back into my MBP.

mmm...too bad let's hope they'll solve this mess with next firmware...

 

[3282868]

I have the Vertex two and haven't had any problems. I think I read somewhere that you could see some sleep problems if you use the optibay for a boot partition.

Interesting. This is the first I have read of this as a possible issue. I have been having the hibernate kernel panic on my 2010 Westmere 6-Core with the OCZ Vertex 2 120GB SSD. I flashed the FW from 1.23 to 1.24. I have the SSD installed in the 6th SATA connection that is normally for another optical drive. I wonder if that may also be the issue.

 

[Brawne]

I just bought a refurbished 13" MacBook Pro, removed the stock drive and installed a new 120 GB Vertex 2, then installed a new system onto the drive from the restore disc that came with the machine.

At first everything was fine, but after installing a few programs I started to get 10 to 15 second freezes every few minutes. The beach-ball would spin, and the machine would lock up.

Went to the OCZ forum, and saw that my combination of machine and drive was known to be problematic. One suggested fix was to downgrade the firmware on the drive to 1.21. Other suggestions were to switch "Allow the hard drive to sleep" setting in System Prefs / Energy saver to off. Another was to turn the Sudden Motion Sensor (SMS) off (use Terminal and: sudo pmset -a sms 0). These two helped, but I was still getting some freezes so I removed iStat Menus 3.12 which has been crashing on one of my Hackintoshes. Did a restart (12 seconds) and everything has been fine since. The machine has not locked up for 40 hours. Sleep works and everything now appears to be fine.

The drive is reported as having firmware 1.25 in System Profiler (strange as the latest release on the OCZ forum is 1.24).
The machine is a 13" MacBookPro 7,1 2.4 GHz with 4 GB of RAM

If I start having problems again I will report them here.

 

[NickZac]

IIRC I read this has to do with the Sandforce controller and most recent updates from Apple which causes the 13 inch MBP's to go to sleep/hibernation, but not wake up. It's a new problem because only did this pop up about 2-3 weeks ago due to the past updates. An update is in the works and for the time being I just disabled auto-sleep. If this is the problem that I am pretty sure it is, you should be able to get around this (until the patch is released) if you manually put the computer to sleep as opposed to the computer putting itself to sleep.

 

[sstyle]

I have MB Pro MC374 (mid 2010 13") with Vertex 2 90Gb. it works well without any problems. I enable noatime, disable Sudden motion sensor, and uncheck sleep mode in sys prefs for ssd. Firmware 1.23

 

[tiagoaquino]

Hello, I also have this same problem with Vertex2 (firmware 1.23) + MBP 13" (Mid 2010). The system freeze from 15-20 secs in 5-10 mins.

How can I downgrade to firmware version 1.11? Pleaasseeee...

Thanks

 

[sstyle]

Hello, I also have this same problem with Vertex2 (firmware 1.23) + MBP 13" (Mid 2010). The system freeze from 15-20 secs in 5-10 mins.

How can I downgrade to firmware version 1.11? Pleaasseeee...

Thanks

It`s very strange. Try to update firmware to 1.24 and

switch "Allow the hard drive to sleep" setting in System Prefs / Energy saver to off. Also turn the Sudden Motion Sensor (SMS) off

 

[Bjango]

These two helped, but I was still getting some freezes so I removed iStat Menus 3.12 which has been crashing on one of my Hackintoshes. Did a restart (12 seconds) and everything has been fine since.

We're looking into this. Disabling the Sensors and turning off "Monitor S.M.A.R.T drive temps" should help.

So hopefully we can fix the issue. Please note that we don't officially support hackintoshes though.

 

[Brawne]

Stall free as long as I don't use iStat Menus 3

Instead of iStat Menus 3 I have been running the ugly preference pane Menu Meters.
Updated the system to 10.6.6 and 8 GB of ram, thought I would try iStat again. Same stalls with V3.10 and V3.12 so went back to MenuMeters.

Yesterday I tried iStat V3.16 Immediately the system started to hang for 15-20 seconds when I tried to change a setting, or switched apps. Changed iStat settings so that it was not monitoring the hard drive at all. Only reporting on CPU usage, network, battery and time. After an hour or two I uninstalled and went back to MenuMeters, no hangs since.

 

[sstyle]

Instead of iStat Menus 3 I have been running the ugly preference pane Menu Meters.
Updated the system to 10.6.6 and 8 GB of ram, thought I would try iStat again. Same stalls with V3.10 and V3.12 so went back to MenuMeters.

Yesterday I tried iStat V3.16 Immediately the system started to hang for 15-20 seconds when I tried to change a setting, or switched apps. Changed iStat settings so that it was not monitoring the hard drive at all. Only reporting on CPU usage, network, battery and time. After an hour or two I uninstalled and went back to MenuMeters, no hangs since.

you should disable S.M.A.R.T checking in iStat prefs

 

[Brawne]

you should disable S.M.A.R.T checking in iStat prefs

S.M.A.R.T was disabled in iStat. When that didn't help I disabled all drive sensors in iStat, and when that still did not stop the hanging I uninstalled iStat. That got rid of the hangs.

 

[DesmoPilot]

OCZ Vertex 2 180GB user here (though on a 15"), no problems at all running FW1.28.

 

[stylinexpat]

I am running 2 Vertex 2 SSD's in my MBP 13" with no problems what so ever. It runs fast and smooth with no problems. If you bought a new Vertex 2 SSD and did a clean install you should have no problems.

 

[davecheng]

I have a 180GB Vertex 2 running firmware 1.28 in an Early 2011 MacBook Pro 8,1 (2.3GHz Core i5).

I'm experiencing problems with freezing on wake from automatic sleep.

If the machine is put to sleep by me (e.g. closing the lid) it wakes just fine. If the system goes to sleep after timing out, it refuse to wake. This is 100% repeatable issue that has been documented with users of OWC SSDs using the SandForce controller:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1057025/

I've tried the SSD by itself in the HDD bay. I'm currently using the SSD in an optibay with a standard 1TB HDD in the HDD bay. Same issue.

Anyone else experiencing this problem with OCZ SSDs? I'm on the verge of returning this drive for something else less problem plagued.

 

[aznguyen316]

Hi, thank you for your feedback. Unfortunately it seems (from what I've read on the ocz forums) that the 2010 13" has a different chipset from 15" and 17" and that chipset is the one that gives the slowdown problem with the ocz (firmware >= 1.22). From what I've heard the firmware 1.11 is not affected, but then hibernation will not work.

Note to everybody: hibernation is not the same thing as sleep. It's the one that saves your data when you are very low on battery.

Thanks for that info. It seems like I've had a wake from hibernate crash before than on 13" with Vertex 2. But I RARELY go into hibernate and if I did shame on me. I sleep or power off.

 

[sstyle]

I have a 180GB Vertex 2 running firmware 1.28 in an Early 2011 MacBook Pro 8,1 (2.3GHz Core i5).

I'm experiencing problems with freezing on wake from automatic sleep.

If the machine is put to sleep by me (e.g. closing the lid) it wakes just fine. If the system goes to sleep after timing out, it refuse to wake. This is 100% repeatable issue that has been documented with users of OWC SSDs using the SandForce controller:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1057025/

I've tried the SSD by itself in the HDD bay. I'm currently using the SSD in an optibay with a standard 1TB HDD in the HDD bay. Same issue.

Anyone else experiencing this problem with OCZ SSDs? I'm on the verge of returning this drive for something else less problem plagued.

You should disable hdd sleep in system preferenses- power