Thought I should give my 2 cents here.
First quick thing to say is that the method described above on the main post of this thread will NOT work for most people (including me). I spent a whole day trying this, hoping to avoid opening my MacBook again.
I am using Mountain Lion on a MacBook 13-inch, Aluminum, Late 2008 (MacBook 5,1). I was using rEFInd (a fork of rEFIt), but in the process I have tried both rEFInd and rEFIt but there was no real difference on the results. rEFIt is abandoned but still works quite fine on Macs, I just took the extra care of installing it manually, as advised on the rEFInd site (the installer may cause errors on some Macs).
My Mac has the infamous Nvidia MCP79 SATA controller that runs on 1.5Gbit/s(instead of 3Gbit/s) with the “normal” firmware. So I got the R211m firmware which downgrades the SSD to 3Gbit/s which is the max speed for that Nvidia firmware anyways.
Now to get that iso to an external USB, I tried using the Windows SSD Tool Kit, Universal USB Installer 1.8.7.8 and Universal USB Installer 1.9.1.6. Everytime I created the bootable USB pendrive I tried booting with Command-C, alt(option), standard rEFIt/rEFInd and whatever I could think. I even got the USB recognised some times, but turns out that the Apple firmware my computer uses does not like to boot Legacy Linux systems from external drives. If your firmware is different you may have a chance though.
With all that I knew it would also not boot from an external CD drive as well. So I just gave up, opened my Macbook, got the Superdrive back in place, burned the iso on CD, booted holding the C key (no need for rEFIt/rEFInd) and after 10 seconds from Boot I had the new firmware running, gave it a test/check on sysPref. Then turn off again, open, remove superdrive, put caddy/HDD back, close, assemble superdrive on its external USB case again, etc etc etc…
Too bad I found this post just few minutes ago (maybe that should be merged here):
http://forums.sandisk.com/t5/SanDisk-Extreme-SSD/For-those-having-problems-updating-SSD-firmware-in-a-Macbook/td-p/287140
I did not find before because the post name is so long that I could not see a “Mac” there. Also, the information on that thread if compared with this one you are reading are pretty much opposite (which would make me wonder, would it work anyways?)
There is also this thread which mentions another possible issue (if having many USB drives connected during firmware update):
If anyone can take the time to merge the threads, that would help people finding the information.
Meanwhile, I will post a reference to this thread on both of them.
I hope this helps other people not to waste one or more days of their lives like I did.
The upgrade is a must (either the R211 or R211m depending on yout chipset), things get a lot better after it.
BTW, I have also activated TRIM with Trim Enabler and no problems so far.
Cheers!
Gus
