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This is more of a (hopefully) helpful anecdote than a question or a problem: I recently installed a 1TB SSD as my main hard drive in my 2011 MacBook Pro (8,2) and a 1TB 7200 rpm HGST Travelstar HDD in my optical drive bay. The secondary drive was intended to be used as a document/project drive, and as my System Report indicated that my optical drive SATA connection had a 6 Gigabit chipset/connection, so I saw no problem in buying a SATA III drive for my secondary drive. At first, everything seemed to be working fine ... until I attempted to shuttle a large amount of data from the HDD to my main SSD.

I got an Error -36 message and the transfer immediately stopped. Tech Tools Pro 9.0.2 Protection started giving me I/O error messages. It passed S.M.A.R.T. verification and had no bad blocks that showed up in a complete surface scan. I tried everything. Defragged the drive, rebuilt the directory, reset the permissions, even experimented with "dot.clean" ... nothing worked. I yanked out the drive and its optical drive caddy and plugged a SATA-to-USB cable into it, and the drive worked fine. I deduced that it might be the optical drive SATA cable, and I tried replacing that. Same problem.

I found a few things online that suggested, because I had a 6 Gigabit chipset and a 6 Gigabit drive, that the problem might be automagical, that my hard drive caddy and my SATA connection may both be trying to resolve a 6 Gigabit connection, so I replaced the caddy. The problem remained.

As it turns out, the late 2011 15" MacBook Pros (8,1/8,2/8,3) have a unique problem with 6 Gigabit SATA III connections. Earlier models would simply run a 6 Gb SATA III drive at SATA II 3 Gigabits. Later models can run SATA III drives at full speed. My computer, on the other hand, isn't capable of running a 6 Gb SATA III optical drive connection at all. Or rather, it can, but with read/write errors. The only way to resolve this is to use a SATA II drive in the optical bay. That hits on an entirely new conundrum: new SATA II 1 TB 7200 rpm laptop drives are virtually non-existent these days. Fortunately, I found a decent workaround: Other World Computing sells an HGST Travelstar exactly like the one I originally installed, except with proprietary EFI firmware that allows it to run at SATA II speeds.

I'm posting this because it appears to be a problem a lot of people are experiencing with these machines, and because I spent a lot of time and money trying to fix it and thinking the motherboard might need to be replaced or that it was a problem I wouldn't be able to fix.

Yikes!

My daughter refuses to part with hers because of the optical drive—her Apple engineer husband would like her to do so. I have been sticking 2T SSDs in these including hers. No one's been asking me to replace the optical drive and now I'm glad.

I hate to see anyone going through that but am glad that you reported on it.

mikehalloran wrote:Yikes!

My daughter refuses to part with hers because of the optical drive—her Apple engineer husband would like her to do so. I have been sticking 2T SSDs in these including hers. No one's been asking me to replace the optical drive and now I'm glad.

I hate to see anyone going through that but am glad that you reported on it.

Thanks! I actually bought an older model MacBook Pro because of the optical drive, then eventually realized that I almost never used it and figured I'd stick a second hard drive in there (I can still use the optical drive with an SATA-to-USB cable or a USB enclosure). Again, it's just those three model numbers -- any other MBP will work fine with whatever you put in there.

Also, even though my dual drive is currently having problems communicating via the optical drive SATA connection, I seem to be able to write to and even read from individual files just fine. It's only when I try shuttling large files or a mass collection of files that I run into problems. It's not consistent, either.

Armageddon wrote: It's only when I try shuttling large files or a mass collection of files that I run into problems. It's not consistent, either.

The first two builds of the B&W G3 had that same problem—there were a few firmware updates but it was never fixed.

Good to know.

mikehalloran wrote:The first two builds of the B&W G3 had that same problem—there were a few firmware updates but it was never fixed.

Good to know.

I think a replacement motherboard (in the case of the MBP 2011) might also fix the problem. I didn't know that about the B&W G3s!

I was hoping OWC had their specialized SATA II firmware available as a paid download, as the replacement drive I wound up having to buy is the exact same one I already own (and I get cold sweats every time I have to open my MBP), but it was explained to me that it's installed during the drive's manufacturing process, and not available on its own.