Chosen Solution
I installed a 640GB HD on a MacBook Pro 15" mid 2009 but it freezes all the time with plenty of beachball? What can be done? it’s original HD is a 320GB Hitachi that works very well.
A couple of things can be dome. First I would defragment and optimize the hard drive using TechTools, then I would partition the disk into at least two partitions to reduce search time. Keep The system and applications one the first drive and data like movies on the second.
Is your old drive still working well in your MBP ? If not the hard drive SATA cable could be faulty.
If you are installing a new drive and it does not want to come up after you install the system software, Try restarting the computer and hold down the shift key until it comes all the way up. Log in and see what happens. Sometimes on new installs the system is confused and needs to boot in safe mode to figure out what it is doing. If this works and the desktop comes up all the way including your menu at top just go under the apple and select restart and see if all works. Good luck
I have the same issue with a WD 640 GB drive in 2 out of three MBPs. Unit 1: 640 GB drive stalls, Sound quit after 1 day, Apple replaced MBP Unit 2: 640 GB drive works great but sound has high pitched squeal, Apple replaced MBP Unit 3: 250 GB stock drive works no problem, 640 GB drive stalls, Argggggg In all three cases I have went through all the usual support steps, safe mode, PRAM reset, Reinstall….
I have the same issue, too. My MBP installed the OS very, very slowly when using my 320GB Seagate HDD. Besides, it took 20 minutes to copy just a text file from Desktop to another place. Something must have gone wrong? Anyone have any advice? I’m going to buy a new HDD to replace the orginal HDD in MBP but will it work???
If you want to upgrade your MBP 2.53GHZ mid 2009 with a larger HDD downgrade the EFI version to 1.6, the latest is 1.7. This wil solve the freezing and the spinning ball.
