02-17-2012, 12:29 AM

Hi everyone,

I recently purchased and installed a Kingston SSDNow V200 128GB drive for my late-2007 MacBook (MB062LL/B) running Leopard (10.5.8) and with default hardware (with the exception of 4 GB of RAM) in hopes that the SSD would be faster than the default HDD.

Installation of Leopard on to the SSD went fine, and the computer boots up fine. In addition, reading and writing on the disk is good. However, usually within 10-15 minutes of using the computer, I get the rainbow pinwheel/beach ball of death on whatever application I'm running. So far, this has occurred while browsing on Safari, Google Chrome, performing system updates, and looking at System Profiler.

I've tried holding the application's icon in the dock in order to Force Quit it, but that just results in the dock freezing. Clicking on another application's window results in that application giving the rainbow pinwheel as well. Eventually, the entire screen and all applications open are unresponsive and give the rainbow pinwheel. The only solution is a hard reset.

Just to clarify: the disk is formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) with a GUID Partition Table. The connection bus is Serial ATA 2, according to Disk Utility, although the speed is given to be 1.5 Gigabit in the Serial-ATA section of the Hardware menu in System Profiler.

I was wondering if anyone had any idea on a fix. I thought this was a hardware issue (since it only occurs with the SSD hard drive and not the default HDD hard drive), so I thought this would be the most suitable board to post this in. Thanks a lot in advance!

02-17-2012, 02:10 AM

It sounds like the Kingston SSD is having problems. I would backup everything as soon as possible, remove the Kingston and request a RMA or if possible return it for a refund. You can buy a SATA 7200 RPM hard drive three times the size of that Kingston for less money.

02-17-2012, 04:09 PM

G'day and welcome to the forums.

Had a Kingston SSD fail last month. If you have an external drive with an operating system, boot from that, or boot from the system install disc, and run Repair Disk. Min showed fourteen incorrect blocks and Kingston immediately issued an RMA notice for replacement.

Sticking exclusively to OWC Mercury Electra SSD from now on.

04-08-2012, 06:58 PM

Hello

I have the same problem with my MacBook Pro 15" Core 2 Duo (Model A1211).
Since I replaced the original hdd with a "Kingston SSDnow V200 Series 256GB, SATA-3" SSD the mac suddenly hangs or freezes. The rainbow pinwheel shows up and I have to hard reset the computer.

A possible reason for that could be:
The MacBook Pro only has a SATA 1 interface and the SSDnow V200 Series are only backward compatible to SATA 2, please see:
Technical Support for SV200S3 | Kingston Technology
Interface SATA Rev. 3.0 (6Gb/s) – with backwards compatibility to SATA Rev. 2.0

I assumed (my fault) that all SATA 3 drives are backward compatible to SATA 1. I fear I was wrong...