Replacing Mid-2009 13" MBP HDD Cable to Fix Freezing & Beach Balling on EFI 1.7?

[SaturnX]

Hey everyone,

Just wondering if anyone with a mid-2009 13" Macbook Pro replaced their HDD cable (Part No. 821-0814/922-9062) to address the freezing/beach ball issues that come with using an after-market HDD (i.e WD Blue/Black) and EFI 1.7? (also known as the well documented SATA 3.0/1.5 interface issue)

I'm currently on SL 10.6.8 and EFI 1.6 (had to downgrade right after going to 1.7) so that I can run my WD Blue WD5000BEVT without freezing/beach balling.

However, I'd like to upgrade to Mavericks, but that requires me to upgrade the EFI to 1.7 - hence the dilemma.

I was looking at grabbing this replacement: http://www.ifixit.com/Store/Mac/MacBook-Pro-13-Inch-Unibody-Model-A1278-Mid-2009-Mid-2010-Hard-Drive-Cable/IF163-013

Has that worked for anyone? Hopefully some others can chime in before I spend the $50/$70 to see if it'll work for me...

Thanks for any insight!

 

[SaturnX]

Anyone?

 

[Cristian .b]

EDIT: the efi 1.7 issues is with sata2 drives. a platter disk wont saturate sata1 so you should find a way to run the drive in sata1 mode. is there a difference in sata1 and 2 cables? i am not sure about that

 

[SaturnX]

Unfortunately the WD laptop drives don't let you force the drive into SATA 1 (i.e. 1.5GB/s) so after installing EFI 1.7 the system negotiates a 3.0 GB/s link which then leads to all beach-balling / freezing issues.

Some users on 15" MBPs reported that replacing their HDD cable in their mid-2009 MBP with the HDD cable from the 2010 MBP alleviated the issue citing that there was an issue with the shielding/quality of the factory HDD cable... and let them run their drive in SATA2 mode without problems.

However for the 13" MBP, it seems the mid-2009 and 2010 versions are the same part number/cable.

Although I've read some accounts saying that Apple/FoxConn revised the cables mid production, I haven't found many 13" mid-2009 MBP owners chiming in on the issue.

Alternatively, I could change my drive to a Hitachi Travelstar series which can be forced into SATA-1 mode - but I've never been a fan of Hitachi reliability.