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SSD Corruption in Optibay

M

mtfbwy

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 29, 2005
47
4
I've had a Kingston 128gb SSD in my optical drive bay and a 1 tb WD 5200 RPM drive in my standard HDD bay since I got my 15" MBP about 6 months ago. MOre and more I've noticed disk corruption issues especially when I've had to shut the computer down because it failed to do so on it's own. At first, I attributed this to a transferred disk image so I did a clean install of Lion.

Still, I would get an issue where the MBP would do a chkdisk on the SSD on bootup. Last night, I was getting really strange behavior so I started up Disk Utility in the recovery partition and did a repair on the SSD. The repair failed an I was forced to recover from my Time Machine backup (which worked wonderfully).

I love the SSD performance but now I'm thinking of simply putting the optical drive back in and simply using a Seagate hybrid drive or a 256gb SSD in the main HD bay. I really need reliability more than speed although the speed is awesome and my photo and video library has even outgrown the internal 1 tb data drive anyway.

Anyone else have similar issues using an SSD in the optical bay?
 
I have an OWC SSD in an optibay and an intel SSD in the hard drive location. I have not incurred any problems from either SSD. I'm not sure how there could be corruption because the SSD in the optibay is plugging into the SATA port. Perhaps the issues are indicative of a more serious problem with the logic board or a defective SDD
 
I think it is possibly the TRIM hack / patch that I applied. Saw another thread relating disk issues to TRIM with this very SSD. I will back out the TRIM support and see if this solves it.

maflynn said:
I have an OWC SSD in an optibay and an intel SSD in the hard drive location. I have not incurred any problems from either SSD. I'm not sure how there could be corruption because the SSD in the optibay is plugging into the SATA port. Perhaps the issues are indicative of a more serious problem with the logic board or a defective SDD
Click to expand...
 
IMHO, since your ssd is going to be your main OS drive you should keep it in the Main Bay and have your HDD in the OptiBay, since i've heard OptiBay might give SSDs some problems.
 
miker2209 said:
IMHO, since your ssd is going to be your main OS drive you should keep it in the Main Bay and have your HDD in the OptiBay, since i've heard OptiBay might give SSDs some problems.
Click to expand...

I guess I would also have data loss concerns for the drive in the optibay then. I use this machine for digital photos / videos and really can't afford to lose anything.
 
miker2209 said:
IMHO, since your ssd is going to be your main OS drive you should keep it in the Main Bay and have your HDD in the OptiBay, since i've heard OptiBay might give SSDs some problems.
Click to expand...


If u are concerned about the SMS then i think you should test it out first.
I'm using a 13" 2011 and at first i was skeptical about putting my HDD in the OptiBay because i thought there wouldn't be sms. But i tested and there is. I'm not sure with the 15" tho but i'm using the stock HDD and SMS works.
 
Thanks for the responses. I disabled the TRIM hack that I had put in place when I installed Lion. I've had this setup since I got this computer back in May and never really had an issue with it. I believe that the TRIM hack in Lion may be the culprit from what I've read but time will tell.

I've also read that the MacBook wouldn't sleep properly with the SSD in the optical bay but I've never had an issue with it. In fact, it will even properly write the RAM to the SSD before sleeping.

If I still have issues, I will swap the SSD and HDD bays and give that a try.
 
mtfbwy said:
I think it is possibly the TRIM hack / patch that I applied. Saw another thread relating disk issues to TRIM with this very SSD. I will back out the TRIM support and see if this solves it.
Click to expand...

I also have the TRIM hack enabled but I'm using the hack that does not replace the kexts because those kexts are Snow Leopard drivers not Lion. I changed the manufactured strings, I'll try to dig out the specifics from my notes
 
Well, after disabling TRIM, I rebooted and it did a disk check again. I've also read on here that people are having issues with their HDD in the optical bay not spinning down with Lion so I'm not entirely convinced that swapping the drives will fix everything.

This config worked flawlessly in Snow Leopard. Did Lion hose people trying to use the optical bay for anything but the superdrive? I don't have the time to keep mucking with this system. I may have to resort to a single 256GB SSD or a Momentus XT 750.
 
I read that thread on HDD not spinning down in the optical bay.

It is related to Spotlight indexing that drive and or cheap Optibays.
MCE bays haven't had this problem from what I read and if you find that it does disabling Spotlight indexing on that drive fixes it.
 
shootist said:
I read that thread on HDD not spinning down in the optical bay.

It is related to Spotlight indexing that drive and or cheap Optibays.
MCE bays haven't had this problem from what I read and if you find that it does disabling Spotlight indexing on that drive fixes it.
Click to expand...

Nothing to do with the OptiBay brackets (MCE/OWC/whatever).

Disabling Spotlight indexing won't fix it in Lion. The only way I have found to reliably make Lion spin down the HDD in the OptiBay is to use diskutil scripts to eject the volumes when I don't need them. I wanted the SSD in the main HD location for the 6G SATA III connection. Using Alfred makes running the mount/unmount scripts easy, so this works well for me.
 
Removed the SSD from my optical drive and put it in the main bay. Also put my optical drive back. So far, my SSD seems pretty stable in the main bay. Thinking I will forgo the dual drive setup and go with a 240gb drive in my main bay.
 
Reviving this thread!
I've been struggling with my late 2006 MBP and it's SSD. I have a Kingston SV100S2128G 128 Gb SSD and a 250 Gb hard drive in my OptiBay. I have had to reinstall Lion 3 times now.

I originally thought it was due to improper shutdown (cheap $30 Chinese battery from Amazon - don't do it). But since replaced it with my old Apple battery. What happened was the computer would shutdown and then I would boot up and would get the loading screen for a second as a progress bar appeared on the screen and it would shut down.

Most recently, I have been getting weird corruption issues. I had the TRIM support enabled, but recently disabled it. I have been verifying, and repairing the disk several times. It seems to boot properly now and I can install updates and programs now. Many files are still corrupted though and many programs do not work. Furthermore, it said the drive was nearly full (~10gb free) even though it defiantly wasn't full.

This is unacceptable and I need to fix this problem. It seems having a kingston SSD is very common and I am thinking of replacing it with an Intel drive. Having an SSD is essential to this laptop being usable and I just want my computer to work. I will probably upgrade soon, but I'm waiting for the new ones to come out.
Thanks.
 
Whether your drive is in the "optibay" slot or not should not have any effect in corrupting the drive. It's a straight pass through...

Most likely it is your SSD so I would google if others are having issues with your type of SSD. I personally have an Intel SSD (320 series) and I encountered the 8MB bug. The only way to fix it was to use the Win7 partition on my other drive to install Intel Toolbox (which only works on Windows) to do a secure erase on the drive. Updated the firmware and I've had no issues since.

So,

1) Check forums regarding your specific drive model (not size, but model) and the issues it's been having.
2) See if it's under warranty and get Kingston to fix or replace it.

If you do buy another one, I highly recommend the Crucial M4 or Samsung 830 line. Both are extremely reliable and great performers. Good luck!
 
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