The tale of my broken Macbook Pro just took a bizarre turn.
Apple called me (not even five minutes after I called them to poke them for an update) to provide an update on the repair. Apparently my laptop works just fine with both the new logic board and the old logic board – just as long as the SSD is not plugged in.
The happy news is I’ve just been saved from a £420 repair bill.
The bad news (apart from having lost a week) is that my Mac won’t boot with the SSD. I have to go back to the old internal hard drive while I decide what to do with the SSD. I’m a little annoyed, as I asked Apple to confirm it wasn’t the SSD, and was told that SSD failures should result in the “select boot device” screen or some other error, not a grey screen. It’s also not clear at this stage if the SSD is outright broken, or if the Mac simply doesn’t like it – I’ll find out when I get it home and plug it into something else.
I’ve seen other reports of SSD weirdness, including Jeroen’s detailed account. This whole situation with Apple hardware and what should be a fairly standard add-on is intensely frustrating. It’s exacerbated by Apple’s boot firmware failing to do anything sensible.
It’s also extremely odd that the whole setup was working just fine for several months before it failed. I bought the SSD in April, and have been reliably booting from it since Lion was released in July. If the SSD has failed, that means it only lasted 5 months of sustained use!
So, lazyweb: what SSD drives are actually confirmed to be 100% compatible with a Macbook Pro? What is the likely lifetime of an SSD? And why are the hardware gods being so unkind to me this month?!
Related posts:
New blog post: #Macbook Pro SSD saga, part two @ http://t.co/PDBrdz8R
Wherein the #SSD is the culprit, not the logic board. #Apple
Hmm sad to hear about this. 5 months would be really quick indeed, but you should be able to get a new SSD from the manufacturor. (which one did you have?). When I had first bought an OCZ I had the exact same issue with the gray screen. It would not do anything when the SSD was inside the MacBookPro. That was really frustrating, but apparently it had to do with the SATA negotiation that could not handle SATA II drives on a SATA 1.5 controller (which the 2009 model has). Newer MBP’s seem to be able to handle this more properly. You could also check if there is a new firmware for you MBP, but I guess that Apple could have told you that as well.
Andrew Savory: Macbook Pro SSD saga, part two http://t.co/DUGdaWsM
OCZ VERTEX 2 WORKING AWESOMELY HERE FOR OVER A YEAR.