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Flogging the SSD horse - 6g not working on my new 17" MBP

K

kingnimrod

macrumors member
Original poster
Feb 24, 2004
64
8
Could not find a topic here that is helpful to my particular situation, so here goes:

My brand new late 2011 17" MBP will not recognize my 480GB OWC Mercury Extreme 6G SSD. My Boot ROM firmware is listed as MBP81.0047.B26, which ostensibly is a newer version than specified in the EFI 2.3 update -- which supposedly contained the fix to let this machine support 6G SSDs.

Well, as I said, the MBP will not recognize the drive - installed internally, I get the flashing question mark folder at startup. The machine WILL see the drive when connected via a USB enclosure, and I was able to install Lion on it that way.

A call to Apple tech support, which was escalated to senior engineers, was useless. They couldn't tell me if there were any differences in the firmware between 24 and 26 that might affect the SATA III support. The tech recommended I come to the discussion boards for a solution!!

I do know that I cannot self-install the EFI 2.3 updater - the installer says my machine will not support it.

So, what do I do? Supposedly this machine should support the 6G SSD in the main bay, but no luck as of yet. I'm miffed at OWC for not telling me during pre-sales calls that there could be issues with their drive in this machine, but I can't get in touch with them right now as they're closed for the holidays.
 
is it safe to assume that you were able to boot from usb enclosure after installing lion on the ssd?
 
Yep. The issue is apparently with the SATA connection in the MBP. Hoping a call to OWC this morning will resolve.
 
kingnimrod said:
Yep. The issue is apparently with the SATA connection in the MBP. Hoping a call to OWC this morning will resolve.
Click to expand...

How New is your Macbook pro 17?

All 2011 Support SATAIII SSD's on the main bay! and only Support SATAII on the optical bay! (even the ones with Dual SATAIII Connectors...mine has dual SATAIII ports but only main supports SATAIII SSD). 100% sure of this and has been confirmed by MANY along with OWC them self.

Any MACBOOK PRO's Prior to 2011 Will not Support SATAIII SSD's as far as I understand...(Never owned a Prior to 2011 model so speaking based what I heard)
 
I had an intermittent issue with my early 2011 15" and late 2011 15". It worked great most of the time, but on restart or rather after having the computer shutdown for over 4 hours, I would get the flashing question mark. Approximately 3 out of every 10 restarts would get it to recognize. After going back and forth via email and telephone with OWC, they cross shipped me a new drive with updated firmware. All good since then. Growing pains I guess. I'm happy now and the drive is smoking fast. If you have access to a PC, and have a boot camp partition on your drive, you can update the firmware yourself. It's somewhere on their blog (OWC). They may even have an Apple version by now. OWC is great with customer service. They'll help you out.

EDIT: not on their blog, on their main site. I think this is what you may need http://eshop.macsales.com/tech_center/OWC/SSD/6G/Mac

If you don't see you're Mac listed you may be able to use the
OWC 6G firmware update in Windows via Boot Camp®. http://eshop.macsales.com/tech_center/OWC/SSD/6G/Windows
 
Last edited:
Well, after further investigation with Apple senior techs on the phone, we discovered that the MBP is a dud machine - aside from the drive issues, it was also doing weird things on the system level like lagging/blocking up animations and scrolls. Really jerky performance. After erase/installs, PRAM zapping and lots of other stuff, they decreed it to be a faulty machine.

New MBP on the way tomorrow. Wish me luck.
 
Like said earlier here, the 6G (SATA III) drives will ONLY work in the main bay SATA port, not the optical bay, which is SATA II. The OWC 6G drive should work in any post-Febuary 2011 MacBook Pro in the main drive bay. I have a 2.8GHz October 2010 model 15" which does not support the 6G drives, although I did purchase mine in 2011. Only the newer ones support the SATA III.
 
well, crap...

Received the new MBP today, and popped in the SSD. Booted fine once, and I was overjoyed.

So I rebooted to make sure it was working, and back to square 1 - flashing folder with question mark, drive not seen in disk utility. I can mount the SSD externally via USB, but it will not connect in the main SATA bay.

OWC had told me they were going to ship out a replacement drive, but now have decided to pull a drive, test it in a MBP, then ship to me. They contend that nothing is wrong with the SSD, but how likely is it that I have 2 bad MBPs in a row, especially when the drive booted internally once.

Is anyone else out there going through this? Tired of taking my MBP apart over and over....
 
So, this is interesting. SSD is NOT seen when connected to a windows machine via the USB enclosure. Wish I had tested that earlier -then maybe OWC would have just sent a new one out already.
 
received new drive today from OWC. Installed with no problems. So, to recap, defective MBP AND SSD, replacements working fine so far.
 
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