Chosen Solution
Laptop Model. MacBook Pro, Early 2011, 15 inch, I7, 2.3GHz (Model Identifier MacBookPro10,1.)Place of Purchase. Direct purchase from www.Crucial.com. I used Crucial.com’s scanner tool to make sure I purchased the correct parts.RAM Purchase: Crucial 16GB Kit (2 x 8GB) DDR3L-1333 SODIMM Memory for Mac. CT3373680 CT2K8G3S1339M.000 UPGRADE FOR A APPLE MACBOOK PRO (15-INCH, EARLY 2011) SYSTEM.SSD Purchase: Crucial MX500 2TB SATA 2.5" 7mm (with 9.5mm adapter) Internal SSD. CT11397799 CT2000MX500SSD1.PK01 UPGRADE FOR A APPLE MACBOOK PRO (15-INCH, EARLY 2011) SYSTEM.Not Purchased. I did not buy the Hard Drive/IR Sensor Cable Replacement for the MacBook Pro 15" Unibody Early 2011. But based on early feedback below, I’m buying it now, and will post the results.No Problems Before Installation. I was having zero problems with my MacBook Pro. Regarding sound and temperature, my computer was always whisper quiet. I never had any overheating problems and it has always been super cool. I just wanted a larger SSD, and I figured why not upgrade from 8 to 16 GB of RAM.The Installation. (1) Put on anti-static glove on. (2) Disconnected from power source; (3) Disconnected the battery; (4) Removed RAM and SSD. (5) Disconnected one fan because I was curious if any dust was underneath. There wasn’t much dust so I decided to leave the other fan alone. I reconnected the fan connector no problem; (6) I gave one blow of air from my mouth to blow some dust away. I’m confident no moisture came from my mouth. I was super careful when blowing and didn’t blow that hard.4 hours after installation. For 4 hours of use everything was fine. It was a dream. I verified I had 16GB of RAM. Everything was so faster than before. And I was loving life.All !&&* Breaks Out. With no warning, both fans revved up past 6,200 RPM, and the CPU and GPU shot up over 195 F. I had to shut down because the fan speed and temperatures were increasing quickly. I started to panic. FYI: The inside temperature in the room was about 60 F. I was not near sunlight. And my laptop was on my lap as usual with plenty of ventilation.Troubleshooting #1: Wait 15 minutes, Restart. I waited about 15 minutes and then restarted. I launched Chrome and within 30 seconds I was over 6,200 RPM and the temperatures were nearing 200 F. My thighs were very hot from the bottom of the laptop. The bottom felt very uncomfortable to touch with my hand.Troubleshooting: #2: Removed SSD and RAM and went back to old parts. Launching an app didn’t make things go crazy. I ran a video to tax the CPU, Everything was fine. So I ran two videos. It was back over 6,200 RPM’s in about 30 seconds. This wasn’t a problem before.Troubleshooting #3: Run Apple Diagnostic on Startup. I started up by pressing “D” and did both the short and extended scans. No problems found.Troubleshooting #4: Reset SMC with old parts. For my model, I had to disconnect from power, remove the battery, and then hold the power button for 10 seconds. (some places said 5 seconds, others said 10 seconds. I opted for 10 seconds.) I then connected the battery, connected to power and it started by itself without me even pressing the power on button.Troubleshooting #5: Reset SMC with new parts. Didn’t work. In fact, launching any application made me go over 6,200 RPM in less than 30 seconds.Troubleshooting #6: Screamed. Didn’t work, but it made me feel better.Troubleshooting #7: Repair Shops. I went online to find who is the best repair shop in the USA that I can send my spiritually possessed laptop to. But I soon realized that so many repair shops came up in the search results and I have no idea who is the best.
As you have an older 2011 MacBook Pro you really need to replace the HD SATA cable. The original cable is not able to support the I/O data flows your SSD can push unlike your old HDD did. Apple never offered a SATA III (6.0 Gb/s) cable in this series you need to jump to the 2012 series to get the correct cable MacBook Pro 15" Unibody (Mid 2012) Hard Drive Cable and here’s the guide you’ll need to follow: MacBook Pro 15" Unibody Early 2011 Hard Drive/IR Sensor Cable Replacement You also want to place a strip of electrians tape on the uppercase where the cable crosses over to help protect if from the rough aluminum surface. In addition, you don’t want to crease the cable at the folds! This damages it! Instead use a bamboo skewer or the ink straw of a ballpoint pen to help you roll the arc at the needed bends.
Before sending out the Mac for repairs there are a couple more troubleshooting tests that can be made. With your new upgraded hardware installed, launch activity monitor you find in utilities folder, select it to show all processes and see what’s keeping the CPU busy that way. A temperature of 90º C can be handled by the Mac for an extended period of time without major damage, that would be the standard temperature if you were playing a graphic intensive video game. After a new drive is installed spotlight needs to create its search indexes and that happens right when you get into desktop and keeps the Mac busy for some time. If you see in activity monitor processes including “mds” keeping CPU busy that’s spotlight. You may also try installing just the memory with the older drive and later just the drive with old memory to better focus where the issue comes from, in case utility monitor doesn’t give clear indications.
The drive cable is likely a red herring. When you replace the drive the first thing that happens at boot is Spotlight (mdworker processes) index the drive. The high I/O rate of an SSD compared to a spinning drive permits these processes to run like gangbusters. The system that was not designed with such drive access speed in mind. Quite the other way around, the designers would have expected the spinning drive I/O limitation to be a natural throttle on CPU use during indexing. You will find that users of older Macs tend to have accumulated more data so indexing has much more work to do than on a fresh OS i stall, and that when migrating after a fresh install, indexing is gated by migration speed. It’s users who clone a well-used existing system who will see a power surge at start up. Once the Spotlight indexing completes, the high load stops. This situation can seem alarming because Macbooks of all stripes are not intended to be run at full load due to power and cooling barriers. However they are designed to withstand it! You will find that Intel regards 100C as the top of the normal operation CPU operating range, and that a die temp of around 125C will force a protective shutdown. To human sensation, such temps seems astoundingly hot as you would be quickly burned if you touched a part at 100 C, but inside the CPU itself you’ve got a literal chip of sand and 100 C is nothing to it except a factor in a total system balance power. Worrying about it being hot is like worrying about water for tea being hot; just don’t spill it on yourself! As can be seen, coupling that hot chip to the outside world is a challenge, with small fans running fast to move sufficient cool air across a tiny radiator. So under high load the system is annoyingly noisy, the case gets hot, and the battery rapidly drains. You might have noticed that at first start of a fresh macOS installation, a desktop notification warns about a temporary performance impact of drive indexing. Once the drive is indexed, only changes are tracked and Spotlight will no longer be a heavy burden. You can test this explanation for yourself by using System Preferences > Spotlight : Privacy tab. Use (+) to add Macintosh HD to the list to stop indexing and delete the existing index, then (–) to remove it from the list so indexing starts over, just as happens behind the scenes at first boot after installing a fresh clone of a hard drive. Note fan speed for 10–20 mins. When fans speed up, use Activity Monitor to look at CPU usage and note “mds” and “mdworker” processes with high utilization. When indexing completes these will settle down and system will cool. Spotlight indexing alone is a high load and causes racing fans. Other CPU intensive activities running at same time add to the load. Problems with Spotlight loading may be even more problematic for aftermarket NVMe storage because it’s much higher performance than SATA. I have seen the NVMe drive itself overheat and die on a hackintosh. So as to the concern that SATA drive data cables are a cause of bad thermals, this claim deserves more evidence than anecdotal observations about “data flows”. While it’s true that the internet is “not dump trucks, but a series of tubes” it is not true that data cables get hot by being over-loaded. Nor can we assume the CPU is running data error-correcting checks on hard drive I/O. Drive CRC is not a function of the I/O channel to the drive, it is a drive-internal media function. There is no concept of a retry on internal bus errors like in networking, any more than there are RAM retries — there aren’t. In Macbooks, faulty drive cables typically result in device being fundamentally unreliable, not overloading. Also, there is no such factor as generational SATA cables, and even if there were we should expect Apple would supply SATA drive cables that match the generational revision of the controller in the Mac. So while the answers pertaining to purchasing new drive cables are appealing in the context of a drive cable supply co., there is not much technical substance to this suggestion. It could conceivably be true by some arcane law, but in the situation described in original post, it’s mist likely Spotlight.
Hello Dan, I have the same problem but on my Mid 2010 13” MacBook Pro, 2,4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 8GB RAM, Model Identifier: MacBookPro7,1 I upgraded the RAMs a year ago and it was working just fine. The problem started right after upgrading the hard drive to a SSD. It’s a Samsung QVO 860 1TB. Do you suggest the hard drive cable of Mid 2012 for this MBP too?
