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Boots from USB but not from SATA

T

t4ggs

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 9, 2010
39
0
Hi have this problem with a Corsair Force LS 240 Gb SSD and a Macbook Pro 13” 2010 (Model identifier MacBookPro7,1) running El Capitan, when I connect the SSD via USB it boots perfectly, but when I replace the internal hard disk with the SSD, it just won’t boot. It reaches the part with the apple logo and the progress bar but after more than 8 hours it’s still there.



I used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the hard drive to the SSD.



I’ve heard that this is because the SSD has a bandwidth of 3 Gb/s while the MacBook Pro motherboard has only a 1.5 Gb/s. It should be backwards compatible but for a weird reason Macs have a problem with this. The SSD has no pins for jumpers in order to bypass this (as other vendors have).



Any idea if this is really the problem? if so, any idea on how to solve this?



Thanks.
 
The backwards compatibility shouldn't be a problem in my opinion.
Sounds more like a failing internal SATA cable.

(Also, the bandwidths are 6Gb/s for the SSD and 3Gb/s for the MBP.)
 
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Yep agree with above there have been many reports that the SATA cable is very sensitive and can need replacing along with the drive.
 
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The 2010 MBP likely has the NVidia MCP79 SATA chipset - there are numerous SSD's that don't work well or at all with this chipset. The Corsair Force LS has a Phison controller. I was able to find a couple of articles on the Internet from people saying they had a problem with this combination - that's not much. But I also haven't been able to find articles from people saying they had the Corsair Force LS working in their MBP 2010 either. That it works with USB but not SATA, besides the cable issue, could be an indication that the drive (more specifically the controller) doesn't work well with the MCP79 chipset. But the Force LS doesn't seem to be too popular so there's very little information out there about whether it actually can work in the MBP 2010.

EDIT: If you can find a couple instances on the Internet of people who have the Force LS working in the 2010 MBP, you should probably try a new cable. A cable may work with the HDD but not the SSD. If you can't find anything on the Internet, you'd have to decide whether the cost of the cable is worth trying.
 
Last edited:
t4ggs said:
but when i put the old disk inside it works. so the sata cable is ok
Click to expand...
- Not necessarily. SSDs require more of the cable than HDDs. It's pretty typical that failing cables work fine with the original hard drive but not with newer SSDs.

If you are able to try out a different SSD internally, that'd be great - just to have some info on the possibly poor compatibility with the Corsair.
 
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t4ggs said:
but when i put the old disk inside it works. so the sata cable is ok
Click to expand...
Still sounds like the cable to me. I have seen this several times where the HDD works but and SSD won't. My theory is the SSD is moving much more data, so a borderline cable falls over with the stress of running the SSD and not with the lower bandwidth HDD.
 
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