NEW HDD Hard Drvie Cable 821-1480-a for Macbook Pro Unibody 13" A1278 2012

A friend of mine brought me their computer since it had the blinking question mark folder of death pop up. I work in IT and I have seen it before so i just say buy a new hard drive and I will replace it. Sometimes verifying and repairing the disk will temporarily fix it, but that didn't work. I put the new drive in the 2012 MacBook Pro 13" and to my surprise disk utility was only recognizing that a drive was in the computer, but it couldn't tell the drive name or format type. It was unlike anything i've seen before and I have fixed a ton of macs. I formatted the new hard drive with an external adapter on my personal computer and named the drive after her name. It worked on my computer externally, but her mac would not see the name of the hard drive. Just shows me that there was one in the computer. I thought it was a motherboard problem at first, so I plugged the new hard drive into her computer using my USB to SATA adapter. It recognized the drive and could install the OS on it via USB. So it wasn't the motherboard. Has to be the cable. Sure enough it was. I bought this cable since it was very cheap and had good reviews. I still was unsure that it would fix the problem and I was reluctant with it not being advertised as an official Apple cable. The cable works great and fixed the problem completely. It is exactly identical to the original cable and fits perfectly. Glad this was a cheap an easy fix. I also discovered that my friend's original hard drive was not dead, but being it is 4 years old on a bad cable it is lucky to be alive as it is. I told her to keep the new hard drive in it since who knows when her hard drive will fail. Told her to keep the hard drive in a safe place as a backup option in the meantime. Hard drives are only like $40 now for a simple 500GB drive. $55 to fix her computer. Not bad.

Great cable at a great price - thanks! A few reviewers here mentioned the cable was not new. I ordered mine in March 2016 and it was new, with unused sticky foam. Installed it and worked perfectly. This cable is < 1/2 the price of the ones with the brackets included, but beware it requires some delicate work to install. The IFixit guide is great. There are some comments too on that guide that link to Apple discussion forum posts with some excellent up-close pictures how to disconnect and re-attach the ZIF connector on the IR bracket.I found it handy to have a magnifying glass, small tweezers, and a tiny 1mm point tip spudger to unfasten the ZIF connector. Careful, it's fragile.Update 2/11/2017: I'm now 11 months after installation and haven't had any issues. Would definitely recommend this cable.

Excelente

After literally fumbling around with a family member's Macbook Pro for days, this cable saved the day. Every single new hard drive I was trying (brand new out of the box) was working when booting from USB but as soon as I tried to boot using the same drive connected to the SATA cable, just wouldn't work. Research led me to a large number of posts online stating that the hard drive cables in certain MacBooks have a tendency to fail. Good price for this one as well considering other websites were selling the same item for about $15 more.

So last year, my MacBook Pro 13” stopped working. The screen was frozen on the Apple logo, it took ages for it to load and when it did the laptop couldn’t find the hard drive and it wouldn’t reboot. I tried everything for days until I saw a YouTube video that showed me how to fix it by replacing the hard drive cable. It said to buy this and so I did. After it came in the mail, I followed every instruction on the video and it worked! The Mac rebooted and everything started working as if it was a brand new MacBook. This was so easy to install. Money was definitely saved!It has now been a year since this and the laptop is still working great.Btw, I am no way an expert on computer software, I just followed a YouTube DIY video.

Not sure if this supports 6Gb/s throughput. I am assuming it does so, but the supplier should list an important metric such as that. That being said, for $12, it brought my Macbook back from the gray screen of death. It's been 6 months and is working great.UPDATE: I bought this October 2018. Now in May 2019, I am suffering through very slow read/write speeds. 5 Mb/s or less. My system slows to a crawl when this happens. For $10 and 30 minutes of labor, it got me through 8 months, but I will be looking for a more reliable cable now.

The Good News: My Mid-2012 MacBook Pro started flaking out on me about a week ago. Worried that is was my SSD going South, but after a few tests I determined it likely was the cable. Not my first rodeo here, since I had another cable fail in a previous MacBook Pro. Went to the House That Jeff Built, found several vendors selling compatible cable, chose this one. Cable arrived reasonably quickly, and I had it installed in about fifteen minutes.The So-So News: The cable I was sent wasn't *exactly* the same one pictured: the ribbon section that connects to the logic board is longer than the original, but fortunately the excess length can be pushed (gently) into the gap at the and of the board near the connecting point, so functionally we're in-the-clear. However, the other sections are just a bit "off" as well, measurement-wise, so one need to be careful routing things, especially adhesively-backed bits. For the price, worth the extra hassle.

Update: FAILED! The part failed 14 days after the warranty period. Worst it happened during crunch time for a project.---------------I got the file folder / question mark icon and the local repair shop was going to charge me $150 to replace my hard drive. After doing some research I took a chance and I ordered a new HDD SATA cable. It took 10 minutes to replace the cable and my MBP booted right up. FYI, my MBP is a mid-2012 model. I will be upgrading to an SSD drive and I'll update this review in several weeks.