Dead Mercury Electra 6G 240 gb

[RoadToad]

It was in an early 2011 17" MBP. It won't stay mounted for long. It took several tries to get it to clone with CCC.

[Robert M]

Road,

C(-)ris is right. The hardware of the drive may be fine. I'd do a bit of software troubleshooting before replacing it, i.e. run SMART Utility, wipe it, restore the OS, etc. I've had drives I thought were failing and it turned out to be software issues. Fixed those and all was well once more.

Robert

[ka jowct]

The problem could be the cable in the MBP.

[decay]

any chance it's a 13inch MBP?

[Lew Zealand]

A number of MBPs from that era (though it's more common in 2008-2010 models) have a SATA cable which is not "good" enough to handle the full speed SATA throughput of an SSD but are OK for HDD use. This seems strange but our hardware guy here has done dozens of replacements to fix this problem.

The difference here is that we noticed this problem when swapping out an HD for an SSD and that's when the problems start. Pop in a replacement cable (~$20) and all is well. Since your SSD was working well in the machine beforehand, perhaps this is not the case. It's also hard to test this without other known good cables lying around (I have a 15" MPB5,3 cable on my desk here awaiting another flaky SSD upgrade).

[Bill in NC]

yep, had mine replaced 3 times in an old C2D 13" MBP.

ka jowct wrote:
The problem could be the cable in the MBP.

[N-OS X-tasy!]

Didn't take long for the OWC SSD's to sell out.

[sekker]

I've been meaning to post that I recently had a failed Mercury SSD that got sick - you could use it for about 5 min, then it locked up. We managed to get all of the data off of it, but it failed in the Mac and an external case.

Died age 37 months with 3 year warranty...

[RoadToad]

All is well. I picked up a PNY 240Gb SSD for $85 + tax at Best Buy, dropped it in the MBP and it's working fine. The Electra drive was in the MBP when I bought it on Ebay @ January 2013. I don't know how old the Electra is for certain, but it lasted at least 2.5 years. Thanks for all of your help!

[Speedy]

And thanks for the follow-up!