Some of you probably read about the fun and games I’ve been having this week with trying to upgrade the hard disk in a 15″ June 2009 macbook pro.
A little bit of backstory – we bought a macbook pro for Sue in June and decided on the base 15″ spec – even the sales guy at the Apple store said it was easy enough and cheaper to buy a bigger drive to replace the 250GB drive supplied. That was nice of them, I thought.
Anyway – after exhausting my technical support abilities and admitting defeat,I managed to get an appointment at the Apple store in central Manchester yesterday and we raced over there in order to see if one of the Apple “Geniuses” could shed any light on the problem we were having. I won’t be visiting that Apple store again. I found the guy very dismissive and quite rude actually. It was the first time I’ve been into an Apple store and had poor service.
His excuse was that althought 99% of drives would be compatible, that this one probably wasn’t. Probably due to some anti-shock technology used in the drive that was conflicting with the built in anti shock stuff in the macbook pro. I asked him if there was a list of compatible drives – he said there wasn’t. I asked him if they sold compatible hard disks in store. They didn’t. I asked him why the drive would work in another macbook pro – albeit an earlier model. He said they were different models. I challenged this and said surely as newer motherboard revisions are released, more hardware is compatible, not less. He said that this wasn’t the case – that there could be something new in some part of code somewhere that has just meant that the drive isn’t compatible.
As we’d taken the mbp in to the store with the original drive in and it was working he didn’t seem to be able to grasp why we were there. The mbp was working in it’s current configuration and adding the new hard disk made it fail. The problem was with the hard disk. I’m pretty sure I lost him when I went through step by step everything I’d tried. He tried to boot the mbp into diagnostic mode which he couldn’t do as we didn’t have the applications disc with us – he said that he was only going to run it to show us and that it wouldn’t bring up any errors anyway. It felt like we were in the way, like we were taking up space and time in a place that was more about the selling than the service. Not the same sort of experience we’ve had in either Meadowhall or the Trafford Centre. You start to wonder if Apple is starting to become a victim of it’s own success and things are starting to creak.
He told me to send the drive back and try another brand/model.
I came away feeling quite annoyed. We’d been stuck in traffic due to road closures in Manchester and it had taken us nearly 2 hours to get to the store and it just felt like a complete waste of time. I hate having a technical issue get the better of me – it just doesn’t happen. When I was responsible for the Network at my last place, problems would eat me up inside until I’d fixed them. I’d take my work home with me and just try to figure the thing out. There has to be a logical reason why this problem exists. If the drive isn’t at fault, it has to be something else.
I got home, booted into diagnostic mode and ran the diagnostics. It looked like an apple version of memtester – only seemed to be testing the RAM and the extensive test just seemed to test the RAM in a more intensive manner. The RAM is fine. I started to do some more googling, varying my search terms and just trying to find someone with a similar issue – I couldn’t be the only person who had tried to upgrade a June 2009 mbp.
Then I stumbled upon the answer, or at least the cause of the problem.
It was the firmware update to fix the problem with SATA transfer speeds. You might remember there was a bit of an issue with the latest model of macbook pro in that it had shipped with a SATA controller that was running at only 1.5GB – Apple released a firmware update to fix the problem.
(Click to enlarge)
The important part of this update notification is the following portion of text
While this update allows drives to use transfer rates greater than 1.5Gbps, Apple has not qualified or offered these drives for Mac notebooks and their use is unsupported.
Quite interesting that they decided to add this disclaimer to the update. As far as I know, Apple only supply drives that use a 1.5Gbps transfer rate – so anything running at 3Gbps is an “unsupported” drive. Shortly after this update was released, June 2009 mbp owners started to experience problems with the drives. In fact, there’s an 81 page thread on the Apple website about it. The Register also ran an article about it. How I didn’t find this stuff before going to all the hassle of travelling to Manchester I have no idea. Probably because I wasn’t looking. I presumed that the issue would be localised to a problem with this specific brand and model of hard disk. How wrong I was.
What’s interesting is that even people using the same model of hard disk as Apple supply seem to be experiencing problems. The Apple supplied drives run on a different firmware revision. Sneaky.
Somewhere buried inside that 81 page thread, theres a link to a .dmg file which will allow you to downgrade the firmware back to 1.6 which eliminates the problems. This is a tool which has been rolled out to Apple Genius bars which someone has passed on to a customer and that’s gotten onto the Intenet. I used it to roll back the firmware yesterday afternoon and I could now install the 500GB drive without a problem. Only problem is – I don’t really want to.
What happens if we accidently apply the update in the future and I’ve got the new drive in? Someone in the Apple thread posted that Apple were working on a new firmware revision to resolve the issues. We’ll see.
All I know is that I’m not happy with Apple – the Hard Disk is a user serviceable part, there are instructions in the manual for removing the bottom of the case and upgrading the hard disk and RAM. When you’ve got Apple staff in store telling you that you can upgrade the drive yourself too then something is wrong. Fair enough if you don’t support third party drives, you don’t have to – but don’t release firmware upgrades that stop them from working.
This is almost the sort of behaviour that got Microsoft into trouble and with all the negative press that the app store is getting for rejecting applications at the moment, Apple need to buck up their ideas because they’re going to start hemorrhaging customers.
