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Why are SSDs more sensitive than HDDs to a failing SATA cable? What do you think about my situation?

  • I have a Mid-2012 13" Macbook Pro. When I got the computer, I changed the stock Toshiba 750GB HDD to a Crucial m4 240GB SSD. After three months of use, my computer started freezing every 30 seconds, and I was forced to stare at a beach ball (Apple loading icon) constantly. I tried quite a few different routes to fix the issue. - I erased the SSD and re-formated it, only to find that Mountain Lion installation failed. I came to the conclusion that the Crucial m4 SSD was dead. - I purchased a Samsung 840 240GB SSD and replaced the Crucial m4 SSD with it. The disk utility built into Mountain Lion's recovery system could not partition the drive or format it. I came to the conclusion that either the Samsung 840 SSD was faulty, or the SSD was somehow not compatible with my computer. - I returned the Samsung 840 SSD, and installed the original Toshiba HDD into the computer. Mountain Lion recovery's disk utility was able to re-format, but the reinstall failed. - I finally decided to suck it up, and go to the Apple Store. My Macbook Pro is under warranty, but I was just too stubborn to let someone else fix a problem as simple as "a faulty HDD/SSD" without trying it myself. The Apple Store told me that the Toshiba HDD was bad, and they replaced it with another Toshiba HDD with Mac OS X preinstalled on it. - I played on my computer for several hours in extreme confusion. The fact that three different drives by three different manufacturers had failed confused me. - I bought a Crucial m500 240GB SSD and installed it into the computer. The Mountain Lion recovery disk utility was unable to partition the drive. - I put the new Toshiba HDD with Mac OS X preinstalled back into my computer. Then, I placed the Crucial m500 SSD into a SATA to USB 3.0 enclosure, and used my working HDD with Mac OS X's disk utility to successfully partition the Crucial m500 SSD and install Mountain Lion on it. I booted the Crucial m500 SSD via USB, and everything worked great. I came to the conclusion that something was wrong with Mountain Lion recovery's built-in disk utility and installation. - I put the Crucial m500 SSD back into the HDD, only to find a circle with a slash through it when I tried to boot the SSD internally. After putting five different drives into my Macbook Pro, only the Toshiba HDD with Mac OS X preinstalled worked. The successful booting of the m500 SSD via USB makes me believe that there is an issue with the SATA cable. The Toshiba HDD that I am using right now boots up successfully, but has a noticeable slight lag to it. I purchased a new SATA cable for my Macbook Pro last night, and I am going to replace the old cable. My questions to you: - Why are SSDs more sensitive than HDDs to a failing SATA cable? The SSDs I installed seemed to have a much harder time being repartitioned or behaving somewhat normally. - What do you think about my situation?

  • Answer:

    I just replaced the SATA cable, and my SSD works perfectly now! It booted up in about 15 seconds. At least I have learned what the solution is in a situation like this!

Taylor Bryant at Quora Visit the source

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SATA transmits data in words, if a single word is corrupted the entire message is lost, nacked and needs to be retransmitted. An SSD will respond much faster and will be more likely to drive the SATA link in bursts and thus will be more likely to trigger such a loss/retransmit cycle than an HDD. This can be checked by looking at the SMART status of the disk as it will have a counter for link errors. There should also be such a counter on the host side for the return transmission from the disk, but these are usually more hidden and I have no idea where to find them in a Mac.

Baruch Even

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