MacBook (Late 2008) + Hybrid SSD

[tobsmonster2]

Hello. I've just bought a 500GB Seagate Momentus XT hybrid SSD and I'm having trouble installing OSX 10.5 from the backup disks which came with my MacBook 5,1.

At first the installation gave an immediate error saying the drive needed to be repartitioned as a 'GUID' (or something similar) partition, which I've done.

Now I'm actually able to get the installation to start up and run, but it's been stuck at 39 minutes remaining for roughly 7 hours and hasn't moved at all .

I've run the 'repair drive' and 'repair drive permissions' options in Disk Utility, and I let the 'disk check' run before the installation began.

Any ideas?

The Momentus XT is drive is running firmware SD24 if that helps.

 

[tobsmonster2]

Thanks for that. The drive it self seems fine; I put it in a caddy and copied just under 1GB of RAW images to it without problem (over USB).

I've read positive and negative stories about the drives all over the place and the differentiator seems to be which firmware version people have installed.

I'll have a go at upgrading to the latest firmware later on, but for now I've left it in the caddy and let OSX install over USB, which seems to be working . I'll post back with the results.

 

[tobsmonster2]

That attempt failed so I proceeded to perform the firmware upgrade, only to find it's already running the latest firmware (SD28 and not SD24 like I thought).

Since then the error messages have become a bit more specific and seem to point to the OSX install DVD being faulty . I'm going to have a go ripping the DVD, so I can restore the created image to an external drive (and then proceed to install from there). I'll post back with results.

EDIT:
Using the method above I was able to get the install going, however it failed around 3 minutes remaining.

Fortunately my Snow Leopard DVD arrived this morning, an I was able to successfully install snow leopard onto the Seagate drive.

It appears the Leopard disc Apple supplied with my MacBook was faulty, an after reading a few threads it seems faulty bundled discs are a common problem amongst MacBooks & iMacs released in 2008.

With regards to performance of the Seagate Momentus XT, running the SD28 firmware it's noticably snappy. After a 5 restarts and opening Safari just twice, boot time is definitely shorter and Safari itself opens pretty much instantly.

I'm on a trip to Scotland at the moment, but when I get back I'll do some proper testing with more meaty apps like Photoshop and things. For now though I'm quite happy with the drive .