Brand new 17" MBP with Crucial m4 PROBLEMS

[RubberShoes]

My friend just bought a 17" 2.5GHz i7 8GB MBP with the 750GB 7200 rpm hard drive.

He also purchased a SATA bay and 128GB Crucial m4.

I initially booted it up, everything worked perfectly. I then opened the machine up and installed the 128GB m4 into the enclosure and took the superdrive out. After completing this task I booted the machine back up and disk utility recognized the new drive, and was running lion off of the 750GB so obviously that was untouched and running fine.

Next I stuck a Lion USB recovery drive into the port and booted up. I reformatted BOTH 750GB HDD and the 128GB SSD and started COMPLETELY OVER, ONLY FROM THE USB DISC (and had the internet option recovery)

Now I am on the install process, and this is where problems have begun. At 19 minutes the install time drastically lags and it took another 3 or 4 hours to complete the install.

Once this installation was complete, the machine booted fine, but after about 4 or 5 restarts, the Finder would not stop locking up and the machine was performing quite poorly.

So here I sit, trying to reinstall Lion again, and I am stuck at the 19 minutes-and-eventually-slowly-counting-down problem again. This time I am doing it from the internet recovery to rule out the USB drive as a possible problem. However, I'm still stuck on the 19 minutes.

I've also noticed the laptop is becoming increasingly hot, and the fans are beginning to kick in at pretty high speeds.

What could cause this? The SSD was working perfectly until the restarts seemed to have ruined it, could it be faulty after such a short period of time?

I would appreciate any help or suggestions at all,

and thank you very much for your time

RS

 

[Macman45]

It could have been faulty out of the box...It happens. I would abort the install if the MBP is heating it will eventually shut itself down to protect itself from damage.

So many stories about bad SSD's, when they work, they are great, but they can be a nightmare too. I'd take it out, install Lion on the HDD and see if you can get that SSD checked out.

 

[negativzero]

IIRC, the 17" MBPs have a problem with the SSD in the optibay drive. Switch it out to the main bay and the HDD in the optibay. You can read this link for more info on it.

http://blog.macsales.com/10433-macbook-pro-2011-models-and-sata-3-0-6-0gbs-update-5272011

 

[wonderspark]

Also, make sure it has firmware 309 on it before you take out the superdrive. The M4 is said to have a bug in firmware 009 that will make it brick itself after 5000 hours of use, and last I checked, the only way to update the firmware is via the physical CD drive internally installed... NOT via an external drive.

Crucial stated they're working on a thumb drive solution, but in the meantime it's making people pretty crazy. Read this on their SSD forum. I updated mine with internal CD method very easily, but I'm on a desktop. Just a heads-up.

 

[RubberShoes]

Thanks to your posts I fixed the problem by switching the HDD and SSD so the HDD resides in the 2nd optical bay slot and the SSD resides in the primary bay.

Sadly I didn't catch the firmware post you put before I put the machine back together so that's another project for another day (and before 5000 hours)

But in the end thank you negativzero! Your solution was exactly what I was looking for.