Intel 520 freezes on MacBook Pro/Mac OS X Snow Leopard

[idata]

Hi all,

I installed an Intel 520 SSD (240GB) in my MacBook Pro yesterday. After reinstalling the system, I moved my datas.

I encounter freezes! A few seconds freezes/hangs. Quite often actually.

It seems a bit random but it is really annoying! The whole computer is frozen.

I noticed it happens more often when a lots of datas are going in and out. Browsing the web doesn't do much things. Copying a file from a disk image (DMG) to desktop, it freezes… sometimes.

The SSD has the 400i firmware. I installed the drive in the HHD bay. Negotiated Link Speed is 6 Gigabit. MacBook Pro EFI is up-to-date. Software is up-to-date.

I haven't activated the "Trim Enabler" software (Mac OS X doesn't manage for 3rd party drives).

I cannot run the SSD Toolbox from my Mac. I'll try to install Windows and see if it hangs up.

Have you heard about these problems? What can I do? I don't want to keep a drive behaving like this!

Thanks for your help,

[idata]

I put a 240GB 520 into a MacBookPro5,1 running 10.6.4 and encountered this exact problem. After poking around the internets and figuring how to enable TRIM the problem seems to have gone away and I am getting solid 100MB/s write performance.

Let's hope this sticks.

/nqp

[idata]

After dicking around with the TRIM tools I came into conclusion they have nothing to do with the hangs. With MBP 5,1 running 10.6. there seems to be no sensible way to avoid the 20s beach ball once every 5 minutes.

The spookiest bit I found was someone doing hacked EFI images that "should fix" the issue but gladly there wasn't one available for 5,1 so I skipped that. Back to spindles it seems

[idata]

I have an Early-2011 that has 6 Gbps link speed and have no problems. I heard that the first few months the controllers were only set to 3 Gbps. Figure out which one you have by going into About This Mac and then selecting System Report... Select Serial-ATA and you'll find teh Link Speed and Negotiated Link Speed. I'm curious which one you've got.

To confirm, my Early-2011 is doing fine with the Intel 520 480GB SSD. My issue was a corrupted USB Time Machine backup drive.

[idata]

I always had 6 Gbps. I have the issue without using Time Machine at all.

Maybe I should add that the problem has actually improved quite a lot. Only rare freezes now. I did many things, but I suspect clearing caches was what actually helped (emptying ~/Library/Caches and then reboot, you can try and see if it helps you).

[idata]

I've tried and that didn't help unfortunately. Besides, I've got the same problem on the clean Mac OS install.

Does anybody know what's the current version of the firmware of 520, hopefully Intel will be issuing the fix? I've read the 320 about Intel and Apple support pointing fingers into each other, which is really sad. From my perspective as a customer I would expect Intel to fix the issue, since Mac worked perfectly before with x25-M and the problems were introduced when I upgraded to 520. It would be really great to get at least some comments on the subject from Intel.