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MBP killed 2 Intel SSDs

C

chopper dave

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 23, 2007
139
0
I was running great with a 160GB Intel G2 SSD in my 17" 2010 MBP i7 and the stock Apple 500GB drive in an Optibay. After 3 months of great performance, in August it suddenly died. The beachball came, then I rebooted and that was the last time I could read from my boot drive. I plugged it into my desktop and tried to flash the firmware, but Intel's firmware CD couldn't recognize the drive.

I got the drive replaced under warranty, and that one worked just fine until two days ago when the exact same thing happened again- total failure. I am getting it replaced by Intel yet again, but chances are they'll eventually catch on and stop sending me new drives every three months.

The Intel technician said that their failure rates on SSDs after 1 month on stuff outside of servers are incredibly low, and the chances of getting two bad drives are unheard of. He said the only time they have had multiple failures like this is with people with either a bad SATA cable or a bad motherboard which would send too much power to the drive.

I guess I have several questions:

Has anyone else ever had something like this happen to them?

I am beginning to think this is Apple's fault, not Intel. Any advice on how best to convince Apple Support to help me out? It's tricky because it's a catastrophic failure that only happens every few months.

My first course of action will be to just replace the SATA cable myself, which I found for $20 online. Any other suggestions are helpful.
 
man your pretty rich. Haha.

SSD failure is rare. It is possible that your logic board is the cause. Possible causes to this are that you installed it incorrectly or sudden motions caused it.

Why don't you try making it back to the stock setup, hard drive back in it's original place and reinstall leopard and see if the logic board destroys your hard drive. If it does I would take it to the apple store after covering up your optibay improvements.
 
I've run my Intel G2 160GB (without TRIM update) in my old MBP for 9 months perfectly fine.
 
I just installed a new x-25m G2 160G on my 15' pro last week. Hope it won't die on me that fast.
 
The same thing has happened to me... I installed a 1TB drive in the standard hard drive bay and placed the year old 160GB Intel G2 SSD drive in the opti-bay using the OWC data-doubler product. About a day later after that install the OS hung and then I rebooted my MacBook Pro 15" and it never did boot again.

I took the drive out and placed into a PC to see if I can read it or even reflash it and no-go. The drive would show up in the BIOS as "Intel Postville" not the standard "Intel 160GB SSD" string. The other odd thing was that only 8.6MB could be seen and even formatted. Perhaps that 8.6MB was cache area or even firmware area?

I called Intel up and they were happy to replace my drive, I am still waiting for the drive to arrive. In the meantime I decided to use this event as an opportunity to purchase a 240GB SandForce based drive from OWC. My understanding the SandForce drives have a much better performance than Intel's.

One thing, were you using PGP Whole Disk Encryption on the drive? I am thinking that might have been what did it for my drive. Perhaps too many writes for MLC type memory chips... who knows? <shrug>
 
trance2 said:
The same thing has happened to me... I installed a 1TB drive in the standard hard drive bay and placed the year old 160GB Intel G2 SSD drive in the opti-bay using the OWC data-doubler product. About a day later after that install the OS hung and then I rebooted my MacBook Pro 15" and it never did boot again.

I took the drive out and placed into a PC to see if I can read it or even reflash it and no-go. The drive would show up in the BIOS as "Intel Postville" not the standard "Intel 160GB SSD" string. The other odd thing was that only 8.6MB could be seen and even formatted. Perhaps that 8.6MB was cache area or even firmware area?
Click to expand...

That is my exact experience- it shows up as an unusable 8GB "intel postville" drive in disc utility, whatever that means. I imagine it's a lower level of the firmware that wasn't zapped showing through.

trance2 said:
I called Intel up and they were happy to replace my drive, I am still waiting for the drive to arrive. In the meantime I decided to use this event as an opportunity to purchase a 240GB SandForce based drive from OWC. My understanding the SandForce drives have a much better performance than Intel's.

One thing, were you using PGP Whole Disk Encryption on the drive? I am thinking that might have been what did it for my drive. Perhaps too many writes for MLC type memory chips... who knows? <shrug>
Click to expand...

I was using the drive as a standard HFS volume, no encryption. Interesting that yours was in the Optibay while mine was in the main bay. I originally tried a Corsair F100 (Sandforce) but it had issues formatting so I returned it and got Intel- perhaps it was related to the same issue?

I am very curious as to how the sandforce drive works on your computer and might PM you later about it. At this point, I'm willing to buy any recently made SSD as long as it will not fail- my desktop would much appreciate the "discarded" Intel and it's not worth the 2 weeks of lost productivity every time this happens.

I'll post later about what I can get Apple support to admit about this, probably nothing.
 
I've been running a G1 160 on my early 2k8 machine for just over 1.5 years (installed mid-May last year). I know that's a totally different chipset, just putting it out there.

Been going like a tank. One thing I've done is turn off spotlight as that amount of indexing is not healthy.
 
trance2 said:
The same thing has happened to me... I installed a 1TB drive in the standard hard drive bay and placed the year old 160GB Intel G2 SSD drive in the opti-bay using the OWC data-doubler product. About a day later after that install the OS hung and then I rebooted my MacBook Pro 15" and it never did boot again.

I took the drive out and placed into a PC to see if I can read it or even reflash it and no-go. The drive would show up in the BIOS as "Intel Postville" not the standard "Intel 160GB SSD" string. The other odd thing was that only 8.6MB could be seen and even formatted. Perhaps that 8.6MB was cache area or even firmware area?

I called Intel up and they were happy to replace my drive, I am still waiting for the drive to arrive. In the meantime I decided to use this event as an opportunity to purchase a 240GB SandForce based drive from OWC. My understanding the SandForce drives have a much better performance than Intel's.

One thing, were you using PGP Whole Disk Encryption on the drive? I am thinking that might have been what did it for my drive. Perhaps too many writes for MLC type memory chips... who knows? <shrug>
Click to expand...

It is "possible" your optibay caused it. Or it was the ssd. I doubt it was your mac. It is possible though.
 
gman34 said:
man your pretty rich. Haha.
Click to expand...

Yep, everyone who owns a MBP is rich.....havent you read these boards before? If you own a MBP you are rich but if you own an SSD, you are filthy rich! According to all the posters on this board anyways....
 
aimbdd said:
It is "possible" your optibay caused it. Or it was the ssd. I doubt it was your mac. It is possible though.
Click to expand...

SSD wasn't in the optibay, it was in the "main" drive bay. The Apple HDD in the optibay has been doing just fine.
 
Hi guys, I was just pointed to this thread by the forum member jenzjen. I have had the exact same experience as you're describing. So far I've burned through two SSDs. Both lasted right around two weeks before dying suddenly, along with the 8MB of usable space according to Disk Utility. I have an RMA set up to receive my third Intel 320 series 120GB SSD and am wondering if you've had any resolution to your problems that might offer me some insight into mine. Thanks!
 
Could be that that the SATA port where you are connecting it, is having issues, thus killing drives. I've seen that happen before...

Mine has been perfect since August 2009.
 
And I don't suppose that Apple would cover that repair.

Me: "Hey Apple, I've got an SSD in an optibay and that SATA port is killing my SSDs. Will you replace that board for me?"
Apple: "Sorry, you've voided your warranty by installing an opitbay...."


Could it be the SATA cable? Or maybe the SATA board on the optibay? Or would you suspect the SATA connection on the logic board itself?
 
I've contacted Max Upgrades and they're sending me a replacement SATA board for the optibay I purchased from them. I suppose if my next SSD dies a similar death, I'll buy a replacement SATA Superdrive cable from Ifixit. If I get that far and have killed four SSDs, I might just go postal.
 
If your drives keep dying on the same SATA port, don't give it another chance for it to happen, and switch ports. That might help at least isolate the issue.
 
I do plan on a bit of experimenting to see if I might be able to pinpoint the problem. I have contacted Max Upgrades and they're sending me a replacement SATA board for the optibay I purchased from them, as I thought that may be the issues. I'll test that when I get my replacement SSD. However, it'll be about three or four weeks until I can get one. The short version of that story is that I threw away the retail packaging for the SSD, so Newegg won't accept a return on it. So I went to Intel for the warranty claim, and they won't do a thing with it until 30 days after purchase. So I have to wait until June 10 to follow through with that.

In the meantime, I am going to install OSX onto an older HDD that I pulled from my 2008 macbook when I upgraded it's drive. I'll place that old HDD into the optibay with the same equipment as I used in the setup that's killed the two SSDs so far, and see how the HDD fares.

If it shows no signs of any problems, when i get the SSD I may switch the SSD to the main HDD bay and put the HDD in the optibay. I'm a bit hesitant to do that though, as I'm not sure if the stock HDD that came in the MBP has built in sudden motion sensors to park the heads if I drop the machine.
 
bozz2006 said:
If it shows no signs of any problems, when i get the SSD I may switch the SSD to the main HDD bay and put the HDD in the optibay. I'm a bit hesitant to do that though, as I'm not sure if the stock HDD that came in the MBP has built in sudden motion sensors to park the heads if I drop the machine.
Click to expand...

You still have too many moving parts. I'd just put the optibay aside, put the ODD back and install the SSD. That way you're only variable is the SSD. If it dies again, it is something in your machine. If it works, great, then introduce your optibay again and see what happens.
 
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