Chosen Solution
I recently got a new SSD (PNY CS 1311 - 480 GB.) The drive itself seems good – it works fine when attached by USB to my MacBook Pro (MBP) and by USB and SATA to my PowerEdge SC440 and my girlfriend’s Latitude E6540 – but I can’t get my MBP to work with it when it’s attached to the internal hard drive (HDD) cable. Here are some symptoms when the SSD is attached to the HDD cable: If I try to install OS X 10.11 to the SSD (GUID partitioned with 1 blank HSFS+ partition) using a USB installer, the partition on the drive is available as an installation target, but the installation fails with the error message: “An error occurred while preparing the installation. Try running this application again.“If I try to erase or partition the SSD (un-partitioned) using the USB installer’s Disk Utility, I can see the disk but get errors like “Couldn’t read to end of disk.“If I try to erase or partition the SSD (GUID partitioned with 1 blank HSFS+ partition) using Disk Utility in the USB installer, I get the error message: “Couldn’t unmount disk.“If OS X is installed to the SSD, which I can do by attaching it through USB, and I try to boot, I get the question-mark folder. None of these are a problem if the drive is attached by USB; when attached by USB, the drive can be erased, partitioned, installed/duped to, and booted from to run OS X without issue. So far, I’ve tried: Reset MBP NVRAM/PRAM & SMC.Verified that the MBP EFI & SMC firmware are up to date.Replaced hard drive cable with new one (from eBay.)Verified that SSD firmware is up to date (thanks to Dan for this suggestion.) Anyone know why this doesn’t work or what I can do to fix it?
Per PNY tech support: this MBP doesn’t support SATA II/III-only drives, which this drive is, so I wound up returning it.
Your system’s SATA port is SATA II (3.0 Gb/s) and this SSD is a dual speed drive SATA III (6.0 Gb/s) and drops down to SATA II (3.0 Gb/s). So from the specs you should be working! So what could it be??? As you’ve already addressed making sure the systems firmware is up to date and you had replaced the drive cable (hopefully with a new not used cable) You’ve hit the top two issues. So the only thing I can see here is the SSD’s firmware. Now the rub… You’ll need to use a Windows based system to run the PHY tool to check it as well as update it if needed. Here’s a link to the PNY firmware Update: Firmware Update. Of course its possible you have a bad SSD here as well… Have you tried exchanging it yet?
The issue in connecting to different machines using varied interfaces exists when the drive is connected. Computer system component designed as internal drives often perform a base configuration to match the installation environment. Once set it becomes part of the firmware rom and is locked into the hardware. I would have bet if you had tried to reconnect the drive by USB to the MBP it wouldn’t have been functional because the first “true” SATA connection was to the Dell Server and depending on what port it was connected to in the Dell it would have configured the drive accordingly (that is one of the items mentioned on the Dell server product page for the PowerEdge SC440)
