Hello.
Like many others here, I replaced the optical drive on my late 2009 imac 27 with a samsung 840 evo, and placed the optical drive in a generic usb case (and is recognized as original apple hardware - I assume that makes it a Superdrive)
After experiencing the read preformance degradation known with the 840 evo drive, I decided to update its firmware. The problem is, that there seems to be a firmware lock preventing any usb unit booting unless it complies with the following:
http://support.apple.com/en-us/ht1948
Which means that the ISO provided by Samsung cannot be used in this case. I have tried forcing the boot sequence from the cd i burned (also tried a usb stick, with same result) via refit, but would get an error saying "The firmware refused to boot from the selected volume":
So, what I ended up doing is installing bootcamp on a partition on the internal hdd. This task was dreadful with many hours of trial and error. As I had no way of booting a windows installer, the only way I managed to do so is running the installer using a virtual machine to write to the bootcamp partition directly. There are various guides on how to do this, but the one that worked for me is using Parallels.
Anyway, after finally installing bootcamp for the sole purpose of upgrading the ssd firmware, I found that the Samsung Magician software indicates that the firmware installed on the ssd is up to date
, even though I made sure AHCI and SATA were configured correctly in Windows - lest that be a reason...
So unless somebody else has succeeded using bootcamp to update the 840 evo, I would advise against the whole exercise.
Hope this might save someone else's time
Like many others here, I replaced the optical drive on my late 2009 imac 27 with a samsung 840 evo, and placed the optical drive in a generic usb case (and is recognized as original apple hardware - I assume that makes it a Superdrive)
After experiencing the read preformance degradation known with the 840 evo drive, I decided to update its firmware. The problem is, that there seems to be a firmware lock preventing any usb unit booting unless it complies with the following:
http://support.apple.com/en-us/ht1948
Which means that the ISO provided by Samsung cannot be used in this case. I have tried forcing the boot sequence from the cd i burned (also tried a usb stick, with same result) via refit, but would get an error saying "The firmware refused to boot from the selected volume":
So, what I ended up doing is installing bootcamp on a partition on the internal hdd. This task was dreadful with many hours of trial and error. As I had no way of booting a windows installer, the only way I managed to do so is running the installer using a virtual machine to write to the bootcamp partition directly. There are various guides on how to do this, but the one that worked for me is using Parallels.
Anyway, after finally installing bootcamp for the sole purpose of upgrading the ssd firmware, I found that the Samsung Magician software indicates that the firmware installed on the ssd is up to date
, even though I made sure AHCI and SATA were configured correctly in Windows - lest that be a reason...
So unless somebody else has succeeded using bootcamp to update the 840 evo, I would advise against the whole exercise.
Hope this might save someone else's time
