MacBook Pro 17" & Kingston SSD now 200

[bullydog]

Hi,
I am new to Mac's so I am wondering if I am doing something wrong here. I just bought a 17" Mac Book Pro (April 2011 model) and wanted to install a SSD drive. So I formatted using Disk Utility and then cloned my drive using carbon copy cloner. I then tested it by booting off of it on the usb port. It worked fine. It actually ran very fast off the USB. I then installed the SSD drive into my Mac and then when I booted up it took forever (several minutes) then once it was running it was so slow. I even tried another cloning program called super duper. Same result. I then tried to do a fresh install from my original drive attached to a usb. After downloading Lion from the server and running through the setup it failed. I am thinking the SATA connector on the motherboard is not compatible with the Kingston SSD drive. Its like the connection works but is very very slow. Does anyone have an idea what to try here. I have searched around but have not found anyone else having a similar problem. I know that the SSD drive works, also its only a couple of weeks old. I went to Kinstons site to check for a firmware update but there was not any. Thanks in advance.

 

[Quinoky]

What I did when I had my Crucial M4 was just a simple clean install by formatting it, putting it in the main HDD bay and then running the internet recovery. Worked like a charm. As far as I know that's the only thing you can still try.

 

[squeakr]

Did you happen to notice if it was performing Spotlight Indexing, as that will slow the drive down and can take a while depending on the amount of data to be indexed?

 

[bullydog]

Spotlighting? No not sure if it was. I am a pc guy so I don't really know that program. If the drive was indexing or something maybe I needed to give it a few reboots. I will put it back in and try letting it run for a longer period.

I did do the remote install with a fresh format and that failed.

 

[squeakr]

Spotlight is the file indexing system used on OS X. In the upper right on the menu bar you will see what looks like a magnifying/spy glass (like Sherlock Holmes would use). When it is indexing a dot will flash on and off within the center of what should be the glass part of the icon. You can also clock on it and if it is indexing it will state indexing and how long until it completes. It is not something that a reboot will correct or speed up, as each reboot just halts the indexing and causes it to start again when the system is back again. Just let it finish and you should see a marked speed increase.

 

[bullydog]

Okay thanks a lot. It seems to be working now. It was indexing with spotlight. It totally brought my laptop to a standstill until it finished. Took over and hour to complete. The fans kicked in and it was running super hot. Funny that it didn't do this when I setup the original drive. I only have about 30gig of files too. Anyway thank you very much for your help.

 

[squeakr]

Glad it worked for you. The spot lighting is something they don't warn about in the manuals when they explain the replace procedure. Coming from Windows, people don't know about it nor expect it, and yes it can bring a system down, but when indexing is complete searching and locating files is super fast, especially on a new SSD. It might have indexed the files originally, but you didn't notice it as you weren't looking for a huge speed boost.