I bought an HGST 2.5" 1TB hard drive to add to my MacBook Pro in the optical drive bay (using an OWC bracket), as the 500GB hard drive it comes with was getting uncomfortably full.
I installed the drive and almost immediately started getting I/O errors. I copied about a hundred GBs onto it, continued getting I/O errors, ran Disk Utility, and that could not verify or repair the disk (“Repairing disk failed with error. Could not unmount disk”).
I took it out and stuck it in my other laptop, running Windows 8.1 and it runs fine on that. Disk Management says it’s healthy, and Scan Drive found no errors.
Is it possible the issue is with my MacBook Pro’s optical drive SATA interface, and not with the hard drive, or is OSX detecting an error that Windows is not? Or something else that’s beyond me?
(I’ve re-installed the optical drive in the MacBook and it works fine, if that means anything)
Depending upon the exact Mac you have you may have run into trouble with the SATA interfaces. The SATA interface going to the optical drive on some older Macbooks is 3Gb/s, and almost any disk you buy will be 6Gb/s. In principle the disk will simply drop its interface speed, but I have seen mention that some Macbooks have issues doing this - and there can be problems doing just what you have tried.
That said - I have a Macbook Pro, and have an SSD in the optical bay (using the same sort of adaptor) and thus far have had no problems. I may depend upon luck exactly which interface chip your Mac has, or indeed whether it is just luck whether you get a good or a marginal chip.
Hard drives are cheap, I don’t have a problem going back to the store and getting a 3Gb/s drive, but I don’t want to spend another $60 bucks on another drive if the drive itself is not the problem.
I think by the model you have the interfaces are all 6Gb/s. Mine is an early 2011. Still it sounds like a SATA issue.
Personally I would drop your 500GB disk into an external case, install the 1TB as the main drive, and use migration assistant to slurp you 500GB disk’s contents over. This should be close to risk free.
As long as the drive seems to be working fine in my Windows laptop I think I’m just going to leave it in there (more storage space is always good).
Think I might just go pick up a 3Gb/s drive for the MBP and see what happens. Think there may be a firmware update I haven’t installed and I’ll just keep my fingers crossed. If that still doesn’t work, I guess I’ll just give up, put the SuperDrive back in, and store all of my large folders on the other laptop.
Just to follow up, I went and bought a Toshiba 3Gb/s drive and put it in the MBP. Everything checked out, haven’t had any errors, it’s working great, as is the other drive in the Windows laptop.
So I guess it was the MBP optical drive SATA interface still having a problem with SATA III drives, despite lots of sources on the internet saying it shouldn’t. Maybe it’s just my machine, maybe the first few machines off the line were still using the old parts or something, I don’t know (I did buy it right when the MBP 9,2’s had just come out).