Macbook Pro freezes every hour. Crucial M4 SSD Fail

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GUY SMILEY
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Macbook Pro freezes every hour. Crucial M4 SSD Fail

Post by GUY SMILEY » Fri Aug 02, 2013 9:05 am

Just a heads up.
Have a Macbook Pro with a Crucial M4 SSD as the main drive and a further drive in the optical bay (so no CD drive internally)
The Crucial SSD is known to fail at 5200 hours.
It shuts itself down every hour (precisely) from that point onwards

There is a firmware update released which is supposed to resolve this, but all of Crucial's support is geared towards PC's running Windows 7. Any older windows OS is not supported. MacOSX is supposed to be supported but isn't really. In order to try and install the firmware on a mac you have to download and install a stripped back linux OS onto a thumb drive to run their DOS firmware update programme. Except it doesn't work, for reasons no one can seem to fathom

Support at Crucial don't know what they're talking about, and are therefore employing any and all diversion tactics to evade these core issues, including insisting you leave the computer 'running' in a frozen state for 8 hours as it will 'resolve itself'. They are also monumentally unhelpful.
You have to get all the information from a few long forum thread (20 pages +) on their website forum. Where there are a number of similarly disgruntled users.

My advice would be avoid Crucial hard drives at all costs.

tekkers
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Re: Macbook Pro freezes every hour. Crucial M4 SSD Fail

Post by tekkers » Fri Aug 02, 2013 9:57 pm

yeah i have a mid 2009 macbook pro .. i heard anything bigger than 256gigs and u need to download those firmware upgrades ...

i wanted to get the 512gig drive but that messing around with firmware has put me off - so not upgraded yet

and this just puts me off more



sorry to hear about your troubles :?

Ubik
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Re: Macbook Pro freezes every hour. Crucial M4 SSD Fail

Post by Ubik » Sat Aug 03, 2013 10:45 am

I upgraded the firmware following this explanation http://www.macg.co/unes/voir/131943/fai ... crucial-m4 (it's in french but it's pretty straightforward) i can help if you need

GUY SMILEY
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Re: Macbook Pro freezes every hour. Crucial M4 SSD Fail

Post by GUY SMILEY » Sat Aug 03, 2013 12:37 pm

tekkers wrote:yeah i have a mid 2009 macbook pro .. i heard anything bigger than 256gigs and u need to download those firmware upgrades ...
Fo the record, mine was a 256 GB. Cheers for the sympathy though !

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Re: Macbook Pro freezes every hour. Crucial M4 SSD Fail

Post by GUY SMILEY » Sat Aug 03, 2013 12:42 pm

Ubik wrote:I upgraded the firmware following this explanation http://www.macg.co/unes/voir/131943/fai ... crucial-m4 (it's in french but it's pretty straightforward) i can help if you need
Thanks Ubik, This is basically the walkthrough I followed too (english version here) http://forums.crucial.com/t5/Solid-Stat ... d-p/106726

But unfortunately at the utildisk dos prompt I was getting faulty partition errors. This is due to UFEI boards (as in my mac) being incompatible with this software (or something) apparently.
No known solution

Ubik
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Re: Macbook Pro freezes every hour. Crucial M4 SSD Fail

Post by Ubik » Sat Aug 03, 2013 12:52 pm

I don't remember if i had this faulty partition error but i remember that i saw several warning messages and that i had to wait for some time after disk check before the upgrade would start. My macbook pro is a late 2012.

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Re: Macbook Pro freezes every hour. Crucial M4 SSD Fail

Post by GUY SMILEY » Sat Aug 03, 2013 1:00 pm

Ubik wrote:I don't remember if i had this faulty partition error but i remember that i saw several warning messages and that i had to wait for some time after disk check before the upgrade would start. My macbook pro is a late 2012.
Helpful advice Ubik, Cheers for letting me know.

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Re: Macbook Pro freezes every hour. Crucial M4 SSD Fail

Post by Anubis » Sat Aug 03, 2013 1:42 pm

Get a Samsung SSD, it's what they put in the Mac's after all.
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Last edited by Anubis on Sat Aug 03, 2013 11:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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miekwave
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Re: Macbook Pro freezes every hour. Crucial M4 SSD Fail

Post by miekwave » Sat Aug 03, 2013 9:40 pm

I recommended that you store your OS and Programs on one drive. Your Ableton Projects on a Second drive. And your Sample Collection/Instrument on a third drive. This allows you to get maximum performance gain with the least amount of strain on your drives. It also enables greater trackcounts at less latency.


Sorry about your SSD failure, if you are doing any work with high track counts/sampler instances I seriously recommend a Samsung 840 PRO. Most SSD failures are attributed to constant rewriting process leading to TRIM failure.


I have a Samsung 840 Pro 512GB and I will be purchasing two more. I LOVE this drive, best SSD investment I ever made.

(Just FYI for other readers)
http://thessdreview.com/
http://thessdreview.com/our-reviews/sam ... able-iops/

The following article describes ways to Maximize the life of your SSD
http://blog.superuser.com/2011/05/10/ma ... -your-ssd/

tekkers
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Re: Macbook Pro freezes every hour. Crucial M4 SSD Fail

Post by tekkers » Thu Aug 08, 2013 10:37 pm

it all sounds like abit of a nightmare!

i was under the impression that cause an SSD is just ram and not physical like a harddrive its not only going to be alot faster, wear and tear on it wont happen and that it can read multiple things at once... but i guess i am totally wrong?

if i need a separate disk for everything i might as well not bother with an ssd and just save up for a new mac so i can get optimum speed from my external usb3 lacie raid thing


OR would one of those 'fusion' drives or whatever they are called that are ssd and harddrive bolted together would be a better idea for a replacement for my macbook hd? keep programs on that and use external for samples...

the ssd option just seems abit too fiddly, with quite a bit of room for error ... reading that blog for maximising ssd life was abit TOOO much techy for my liking.. i'd prolly blow it up 8O

GUY SMILEY
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Re: Macbook Pro freezes every hour. Crucial M4 SSD Fail

Post by GUY SMILEY » Fri Aug 09, 2013 11:37 am

tekkers wrote:it all sounds like abit of a nightmare!
Yeah 'fraid so, although trying to establish what the issue was proved the most stressful bit.
tekkers wrote:i was under the impression that cause an SSD is just ram and not physical like a harddrive its not only going to be alot faster, wear and tear on it wont happen and that it can read multiple things at once... but i guess i am totally wrong?
No, not totally wrong. Basically that is true.. But the issue of 'TRIM' impacts on that perspective slightly. As I understand it there are issues with SSD's when recording to them with TRIM enabled. Forums mention drives failing as a result of this not working correctly, TRIM is pretty much essential by all accounts, and yet Mac OSX has deliberately disabled it for all but Apple hard drives (to prompt you to use their own drives (which are Samsung I think)
Thankfully there is a 3rd Party problem called TrimEnabler which resolves this.
The problem with the Crucial drives does seem to be a 'blip' and they have resolved it with subsequent firmware upgrades..It's just an unfortunate set of circumstances that lead me to have a dud drive due to the model I'd chosen and bad customer support.

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Re: Macbook Pro freezes every hour. Crucial M4 SSD Fail

Post by GUY SMILEY » Mon Aug 12, 2013 3:44 pm

fwiw. Crucial have replaced the drive. It was just over a year old, but still fell within their 3 year guarantee period.

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Re: Macbook Pro freezes every hour. Crucial M4 SSD Fail

Post by GUY SMILEY » Mon Aug 12, 2013 3:48 pm

miekwave wrote: (Just FYI for other readers)
http://thessdreview.com/
Useful post.
Useful tool is also Trim enabler for OSX users
http://www.groths.org/trim-enabler/

But this one is also worth reading to give an idea of problems
as it says "SSD's Fail. A lot"
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/0 ... scale.html

orionka
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Re: Macbook Pro freezes every hour. Crucial M4 SSD Fail

Post by orionka » Tue Aug 13, 2013 3:42 pm

hey GUY... I bought a Crucial M4 256 GB a few months ago to replace the optical drive in my mid 2012 Macbook, but it's still lying around.
Would you recommend to get rid of this thing or do you think making a firmware upgrade on a desktop and replace it like I planned would be a good choice (while using TRIM-enabler). If I understand this whole thing correctly It's just a gambling game... fail might be everyday, right?

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Re: Macbook Pro freezes every hour. Crucial M4 SSD Fail

Post by GUY SMILEY » Tue Aug 13, 2013 4:25 pm

orionka wrote:hey GUY... I bought a Crucial M4 256 GB a few months ago to replace the optical drive in my mid 2012 Macbook, but it's still lying around.
Would you recommend to get rid of this thing or do you think making a firmware upgrade on a desktop and replace it like I planned would be a good choice (while using TRIM-enabler). If I understand this whole thing correctly It's just a gambling game... fail might be everyday, right?
That's exactly the spec. laptop I had. Check the firmware on the drive itself (it's written on it)
If it says 0, 1, 2, 3 or 9 I would ebay the drive if I were you as in my experience it WILL fail (definitely at 5200 hours)
If you have the patience it may be possible to update the firmware with a PC laptop - I personally couldn't get my drive recognised by the firmware update software using my desktop PC (at work) I think it has to be connected directly to the SATA bus (rather than via a CADDY as I had it)

If the drive says 040H or 070H or something you should be OK as they resolved the problem by then.

Whether or not it's a good idea to install is debatable. I'm no expert. Personally speaking, now I have the replacement I have installed it (again) as my main drive.. BUT I have a clone drive (using carboncopy cloner - which is an excellent piece of software)so that if it fails it's not a drama.

My understanding is that SSD's are not necessarily the best drives for streaming audio to. You may be better of with a 7200rpm in your optical bay, and the SSD as your OS drive (which will make the computer FAST !) Using an SSD for recording audio to won't give you any speed enhancements, and it may fail if used for streaming (recording) a lot of media simultaneousl as I understand it.

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