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MBP early 2011 with Crucial M4 256GB 0309 beachball/freezing issue

T

Tony N.

macrumors member
Original poster
Nov 4, 2011
44
8
I cloned my drive using SuperDuper! and I was upgrading from a Kingston 96GB drive. After upgrading I notice that this SSD is actually slower sometimes. I would get the 20-30 beachball/freezing affect randomly. Well it's not so random anymore now that I can cause it to freeze by opening a lot of things at once. This did not happen on my Kingston SSD.

I know I'm not suppose to upgrade to 000F firmware because that makes it even slower! So far, I'm not happy with my "upgrade" but maybe you guys can help me out.

Thanks in advance,
Tony
 
Is this an issue where the whole computer freezes for approximately 30 seconds and then just picks up where it left off? I have both a Crucial C300 and M4 and they both do this. It's annoying, but it happens so infrequently I put up with it given the good price of the Crucial drives.
 
-Ryan- said:
Is this an issue where the whole computer freezes for approximately 30 seconds and then just picks up where it left off? I have both a Crucial C300 and M4 and they both do this. It's annoying, but it happens so infrequently I put up with it given the good price of the Crucial drives.
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Yes. It would happen for approximately 20-30 seconds then all sudden it would unleash its speed on me. I notice it happens more often during intensive tasks.
 
I've tried and tried to find a fix for this since the release of the C300 a couple of years ago. It doesn't seem that there is any, which is pretty disappointing given the number of Mac users who own these drives.
 
I got a replacement from Amazon today. It was one of a newer ones with 000F firmware from the factory which didn't work with MBP 13". So I flashed it with 0309 and it works great. I think the beachball I was experiencing was related to spotlight.

I let spotlight do it's indexing and after it finished its job, I have not experience any beachball. I did a test with the old drive where I would restart and have the computer open all my apps and it would freeze much longer than my new drive. The new drive would freeze for a couple seconds and comes back to life.

Maybe it's my imagination, but so far, the new drive works great. Now if only they would fix 000F firmware.
 
Where is the FUD coming from that 000F is slow. I've been running it for weeks now and my speeds are just dandy
 

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If you're not on a Early 2011 MBP then you won't have our problem.

Anyways, I just want to report back that I'm still experiencing freezing issues during heavy usage (i.e. installing CS6 or Logic Pro). I think I'm going to return this drive and pick up a Sammy 830.
 
Early 2011 2.0

No problems with my 000F upgrade
 

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I'd just like to report that I now have another M4 after having my C300 replaced by Crucial, and after having this in my system for two days I'm yet to experience any freezing. This is on the 000F firmware.
 
I put a 256GB M4, firmware 0309, in my early 2011 15" MBP and experienced no freezing. I updated to 000F and still experienced no freezing. So, the problems aren't consistent. You may have to try it to find out.
 
I found a fix guys!

Buy a Samsung 830 256GB instead! I'm installing tons of crap, indexing spotlight, etc. and it's not even beachballing once. Damn this drive is good. Worth the extra $!

Sending this POS Crucial M4 back to the hell hole it came from.
 
I had the exact same issue with my 13" early i5 2011 MBP. Crucial M4 128MB. It came with 0309 on it. From day one it had random freezing/beachballing under high load of the disk. Beachball would last anywhere from 15 to 30 seconds and make the machine unusable. I'd say if I used the laptop for 8 hours a day, it would happen about 4 times an hour. Tried upgrading to 000F and the OS X wouldn't even boot (boot time was up to 10 minutes when I turned it off and reverted back to 0309 via Bootcamp). Lots of folks are having issues, and Crucial has not responded:

http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD/128GB-M4-Macbook-Pro-i5-early-2011-Lion-Freezing-Beachball-a-lot/m-p/101320#M30087

http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD/000F-firmware-and-2011-13-inch-i5-MacBook-Pro-frequent/m-p/96407#M28747

http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD/Macbook-Pro-2011-random-drive-freezes/m-p/41868#M13131

I could go on and on. Anyway, there isn't a fix. I purchased a Samsung 830 and so glad I did. The M4 works fine in my wife's Dell. I'm not sure why folks rave on and on about M4's since I've had nothing but issues. I was hoping my upgrade to Mountain Lion would fix it, but it didn't. Anyways, I will no longer promote or recommend M4's and whole heartedly recommend Samsung!
~
 
Guy stop bragging about your performance. Can't you see the OP seems to have one of the more common problems that people are complaining about. The quality of the M4's have come into question lately as there seem to have been a spike in complaints of issues with the drive. I almost wonder if this sudden drop in prices is correlated to Crucial buying cheaper/lower quality NAND flash or something like that. If everyone remembers it was the M4 that lead the recent price plunge of SSD drives, then all the other manufacturers followed suit with price drops so they would still be able to move their drives off the shelf.

If you are able to send it back to the manufacturer they will probably send you back a factory refurbished unit....I don't know how the quality of those hold up to a new one...
 
Newbie MacUser said:
Guy stop bragging about your performance. Can't you see the OP seems to have one of the more common problems that people are complaining about. The quality of the M4's have come into question lately as there seem to have been a spike in complaints of issues with the drive. I almost wonder if this sudden drop in prices is correlated to Crucial buying cheaper/lower quality NAND flash or something like that. If everyone remembers it was the M4 that lead the recent price plunge of SSD drives, then all the other manufacturers followed suit with price drops so they would still be able to move their drives off the shelf.

If you are able to send it back to the manufacturer they will probably send you back a factory refurbished unit....I don't know how the quality of those hold up to a new one...
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There is not a problem with the quality of the M4 drives. Micron is a OEM manufacture just like Intel, Samsung, Toshiba, there quality is second to none.

You will have problems with people installing there own drives. Software, firmware etc. The problem I am reading about seem to be with people with early 2011 MBP's. As there was a issue when they came out with the 6gps interface.

As the M4 has firmware updates with OSX, I would be more inclined to upgrade to a M4 than a Samsung 830 which cannot be upgraded via OSX.

The intel SSD's and Micron SSD's come from the same plant and use the same nand. Crucial is Micron's consumer arm. The drives are the same as OEM. The M4 is OEM quality. The same claim cannot be made for allot of SSD drives. Samsung 830 is OEM quality. Intel, the same type of quality.

Just because a few people have problems, doesn't mean there is a problem with the quality of the drives. Don't confuse the two.
 
iamthedudeman said:
There is not a problem with the quality of the M4 drives. Micron is a OEM manufacture just like Intel, Samsung, Toshiba, there quality is second to none.

You will have problems with people installing there own drives. Software, firmware etc. The problem I am reading about seem to be with people with early 2011 MBP's. As there was a issue when they came out with the 6gps interface.

As the M4 has firmware updates with OSX, I would be more inclined to upgrade to a M4 than a Samsung 830 which cannot be upgraded via OSX.

The intel SSD's and Micron SSD's come from the same plant and use the same nand. Crucial is Micron's consumer arm. The drives are the same as OEM. The M4 is OEM quality. The same claim cannot be made for allot of SSD drives. Samsung 830 is OEM quality. Intel, the same type of quality.

Just because a few people have problems, doesn't mean there is a problem with the quality of the drives. Don't confuse the two.
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Oh, good. I just placed an order for the 512gb and this thread was starting to make me rethink my decision.
 
It's the Marvel controllers..

Corsair Performance Pro have the same exact problem...

The problem did not exist outside of Marvel controllers from my experience...
 
iamthedudeman said:
There is not a problem with the quality of the M4 drives. Micron is a OEM manufacture just like Intel, Samsung, Toshiba, there quality is second to none.

You will have problems with people installing there own drives. Software, firmware etc. The problem I am reading about seem to be with people with early 2011 MBP's. As there was a issue when they came out with the 6gps interface.
...
Click to expand...

There was a firmware issue with Early 2011 MBP's that Apple fixed early this year w/ regards to the 6gbps issue. The issue with M4's and these issues is not related to the 6gbps issues since the Samsung 830 has NO issues in my 13" MBP vs. the M4 which was almost unusable. I'm also not saying the drive is not complete garbage because it's fine in a Windows box, but there are compatibility issues with Mac hardware that Crucial has been unwilling to address the issues or even admit there are issues.

And for the poster that said they'd go with Crucial over Samsung because you can update Crucial's from Mac hardware; I don't believe this is correct. I had to use Bootcamp/Windows to update my M4. They supposedly are working on Mac-compatible firmware upgrade utils, but they're also supposedly looking at the 13" macbook issues... since April.
 
I just bought a Crucial M4 128gb to replace a Corsair Force GT 120gb that exhibited the following problems in my 13" Early 2011 Macbook Pro:

* Sometimes freezing for ~30 seconds then coming back to life (perhaps once a day, and I use my computer heavily)
* Unable to resume from hibernation (I'm about to travel, so I really want hibernation working).

The m4 is way worse. The 30 second freezing issue happens about once every 2 minutes. Unusable. I thought it would get better when indexing finished but it was so bad I had to stop using it. Also, to top it off, it didn't resume from hibernation anyway. And when it wasn't freezing, the system just felt slower.

I think there's a problem with the 13" Macbooks. My friends with 15"s haven't had any problems with m4, vertex 3. It sucks but I'm at my wits end with all this. I'll stick with the Force though, it's liveable...
 
FastEddiebags said:
The issue is people not doing a fresh install when they add an ssd or at least that is what it seems to be.
Click to expand...

I have an early 2011 15" MBP. I didn't do a clean install of the OS on my M4. I used CCC and haven't had a single issue in the 3.5 months that I've had it.

And no, that's not to say that other people aren't having problems; some clearly are. But for most people, the M4 works just fine, and most of the time so does cloning your HDD.
 
sweetbrat said:
I have an early 2011 15" MBP. I didn't do a clean install of the OS on my M4. I used CCC and haven't had a single issue in the 3.5 months that I've had it.

And no, that's not to say that other people aren't having problems; some clearly are. But for most people, the M4 works just fine, and most of the time so does cloning your HDD.
Click to expand...

No problems (thankfully) on cloning my existing setup to a M4 512gb on my late 2011 MBP. I also said to hell with it, and am using TRIM enabler with it.
 
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