Making your SATA3 drive work, in your early or late 2011 15"mbp:

If you are unfortunate, and have the "faster" SATA3 chipset for the optical bay, use a hard drive that is either ONLY SATA2 or has a bootable utility you can use to FORCE the drive to run at SATA2 (3gpbs) ONLY. Otherwise, the hard drive (in the optical bay) will NOT be recognizable by the system...This is a lesson in futility, but....There is a cure. I know for *SURE* if you use fast (as of 2014.08) HGST 7k1000 (model HTS721010A9E630), you will NOT be able to run it at 6Gbps. You WILL be able to run it at 3Gbps though, and that beats 0Gbps!

1. Get the HDDFT10.iso (from here: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.p... ),

2. Burn it to a CD

3. Plug in a USB keyboard WITH FUNCTION KEYS (You WILL need them)

4. Holding down the Option key, select the CD when you boot up

5. When prompted, hit F1 to change drives

6. Hit F3 to change to 3Gbps

7. Reboot

8. *POOF* magic Pixie Dust rains down upon you...and your MBP