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Help: Installed Data Doubter and now Airport is gone

M

miata

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Oct 22, 2010
499
0
Silicon Valley, Earth
I have a 2010 15" i7 refurb for about 60 days. This weekend I installed a OWC Data Douber and a second SSD drive with RAID 0. Everything was working just fine right afterwards, but this morning the WIFI was not working -- Airport was off and I couldn't turn it on. I rebooting the system and then the menu said "No Airport Card Installed." This is really weird, since I know that WIFI was working immeadiately after the install. Maybe it is just a coincidence tha the Airport went out right after installing the Data Doubler.

Can anybody who is familiar with the MPB 15" layout let me know if I could have accidentally loosened some cable or something when installing the Data Doubler?

Am I going to have to replace the SuperDrive before taking into Apple support?

Any other ideas?
 
well as the card lies on top of the optical drive there is a large chance you could have disconnected a cable, try opening it up and check the connectors (push them in) that could possibly fix it.
 
mulo said:
well as the card lies on top of the optical drive there is a large chance you could have disconnected a cable, try opening it up and check the connectors (push them in) that could possibly fix it.
Click to expand...
Thanks. I was hoping it was something like that -- I guess we'll see. I'll check it out when I get home this evening.
 
miata said:
Thanks. I was hoping it was something like that -- I guess we'll see. I'll check it out when I get home this evening.
Click to expand...

please post your findings i'm going to be installing an optibay in my new mbp when it arrives
 
mulo said:
please post your findings i'm going to be installing an optibay in my new mbp when it arrives
Click to expand...

Sure enough the Airport cable was loose. Fixed that.

Here are my XBench results with a few comments. Same OWC drives (with slightly different firmware versions). Single SSD was in HDD bay. RAID 0 with 32k RIAD blocks using OWC Data Doubler. I ran the test once with out a FW800 device connected and once with.

I was little surprised that performance was not better. Sure enough there were pretty big differences between with and without a FW800 device attached. The overall disk speed improvement for RAID 0 with FW800 was 24% -- but was only 12% w/o FW 800 connected. This seems to be related to a bazaar i7 phenomenon first noted here by diglloyd .

I wonder if changing the block size would help. Are the SSDs so fast that the slower SuperDrive bay SATA throughput comes into play? Could there be a problem with the firmware mismatch between the two SSD drives. I added the second drive as much to add space as to improve performance, but still want to make sure I am getting the most out of the investment.

XBench:

Single SSD | RAID 0 SSD w/o FW800 | % change | RAID 0 SSD w/ FW800 | % change

Results 309.57 347.26 12% 382.5 24%
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3 1.3 1.3
System Version 10.6.6 (10J567) 10.6.6 (10J567) 10.6.6 (10J567)
Physical RAM 8192 MB 8192 MB 8192 MB
Model MacBookPro6,2 MacBookPro6,2 MacBookPro6,2
Drive Type OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD SSD RAID SSD RAID
Disk Test 309.57 347.26 12% 382.5 24%
Sequential 185.18 203.21 10% 224.82 21%
Uncached Write (4K blocks) 250.12 358.2 43% 445.28 78%
Uncached Write (256K blocks) 266.04 414.31 56% 413.16 55%
Uncached Read (4K blocks) 90.71 80.72 -11% 88.74 -2%
Uncached Read (256K blocks) 354.68 478.33 35% 538.59 52%
Random 942.93
Uncached Write (4K blocks) 1307.7 1277.33 -2% 1264.79 -3%
Uncached Write (256K blocks) 485.16 723.63 49% 814.82 68%
Uncached Read (4K blocks) 2886.38 2696.81 -7% 2805.66 -3%
Uncached Read (256K blocks) 934.79 1223.09 31% 1336.42 43%
From System Profiler:

OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD:

Capacity: 120.03 GB (120,034,123,776 bytes)
Model: OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD
Revision: 340A13F0
Serial Number: MXE12010E45A8735
Native Command Queuing: Yes
Queue Depth: 32
Removable Media: No
Detachable Drive: No
BSD Name: disk0
Medium Type: Solid State
TRIM Support: No
Partition Map Type: GPT (GUID Partition Table)
S.M.A.R.T. status: Verified
Volumes:
Capacity: 209.7 MB (209,715,200 bytes)
Writable: Yes
BSD Name: disk0s1
Capacity: 119.69 GB (119,690,149,888 bytes)
Writable: Yes
BSD Name: disk0s2
Boot OSX:
Capacity: 134.2 MB (134,217,728 bytes)
Writable: Yes
BSD Name: disk0s3

OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD:

Capacity: 120.03 GB (120,034,123,776 bytes)
Model: OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD
Revision: 343A13F0
Serial Number: MXE12011E08B7974
Native Command Queuing: Yes
Queue Depth: 32
Removable Media: No
Detachable Drive: No
BSD Name: disk1
Medium Type: Solid State
TRIM Support: No
Partition Map Type: GPT (GUID Partition Table)
S.M.A.R.T. status: Verified
Volumes:
Capacity: 209.7 MB (209,715,200 bytes)
Writable: Yes
BSD Name: disk1s1
Capacity: 119.69 GB (119,690,149,888 bytes)
Writable: Yes
BSD Name: disk1s2
Boot OSX:
Capacity: 134.2 MB (134,217,728 bytes)
Writable: Yes
BSD Name: disk1s3
 
Last edited:
Airport is gone again...

Not good. Airport was working fine at home last night after I open her up and pushed down on some of the connectors around the SuperDrive. However, I got back in the office and airport could not be turned on. After rebooting it now says "No Airport card installed."

Any idea of why I'm getting intermittent behavior. I wonder if something else could be loose. I know there is a connector on the motherboard that needed to be detached when removing the SuperDrive. There is a similar connector at the other end of that ribbon cable that I also made sure was firmly attached last night. Is there some other connection that may have come loose?
 
Same problem here!

Hi,

I have the exact same computer as you and also the exact same data doubler setup except I'm running two boot drives. I'm also experiencing intermittent loss of Airport function. Exact same symptoms "No Airport card installed" etc. etc.

Have you figured out what is going on here?

Inquiring minds would love to know. My theory so far is that there is a shielding problem with the Data Doubler. I think it is causing interference with the airport cable that passes directly above the circuit for the Data Doubler.

At any rate, if anyone has any info it would be much appreciated!

Thanks!
H
 
timothyarnold said:
I think I discovered the reason you're having troubles. I've explained the situation here:
http://timarnold.calepin.co/ssds-owc-data-doubler-airport.html
Click to expand...

Thanks for pointing us to this problem.

It seems that it only happens with 15" model. 13" and 17" don't have this problem. Maybe you can update this information at your site.

See pics bellow:

13"
p1010073-400x300.jpg


15"
mid2010-standard.jpg


17"
macbook-pro-17-inch-disassembly.jpg
 
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