Hi,
I bought a Seagate Backup Plus slim to extract the 2TB Seagate/Samsung Spinpoint M9T 2.5" 9.5mm drive and put it in my early 2011 17" MacBook Pro. Drive model number is ST2000LM003 and I have not seen the bare drive for sale yet. I currently have a OWC Sata III 240gb SSD in the main bay of the mac, and a Data Doubler with a 1 TB WD blue drive installed instead of the DVD. I am trying to upgrade my 1TB drive to 2TB for more space.

The problem I have is that the 17" macbook pro is unreliable with Sata III in the DVD drive bay. My existing 1 TB WD blue drive only supports Sata II and works great at that speed. The new Samsung M9T comes up at Sata III and is flaky at best. The drive disconnects from the system or fails to copy. It works great in the main bay or a USB external case.

I want to find a way to force the firmware to Sata II speeds. I know you can jumper the drive to Sata I at 1.5 Gbps but from what I read that is unreliable too. Looks like the firmware method is the only reliable route.

Is there a firmware utility that I can try to change this setting? Otherwise is there a way I can edit the firmware directly to do this? In talking to the people at OWC, they said they have flashed firmware on other drives to Sata II to get around this problem, but because they dont sell the bare drive yet they cant support it.

Here is some links on it:

Article about the Mac and the Sata III issues in the drive bay - works on the 13" mac but not the 15" or 17".
http://blog.macsales.com/11895-2011-mac ... s-resolved

Looks like someone fixed it with a crazy amount of shielding:
https://sites.google.com/site/themacbookproproject/home

OWC's firmware limited drives:
http://eshop.macsales.com/Search/Search ... d+firmware

Any help or direction of what to try next would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!!!

I am having similar difficulties with the drive. Bought it to replace a 1TB WD drive. It isn't recognized by my laptop at all but works fine in external enclosure. If you find out how to get it working I would be interested to hear updates. Cheers.

I have exactly the same problem.
Same Computer, and same disck.

If you find any solution tell us .

Thank you.