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This is a tumbling log of things and thoughts that pass my way.
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[UPDATED Jan 1 2012: Nevermind. After two problem-free weeks, the issue is back, and this time resetting the SMC doesn’t fix it.]
I know, it sounds like a joke, right? Whenever you have a problem with a Mac the first thing anyone suggests (including Apple) is resetting the SMC, and of course it never fixes anything. Well I’m here to reveal that an SMC reset finally fixed something: Thunderbolt Display flickering during Thunderbolt disk I/O.
I’m posting this here for Google’s sake, since I was unable to find anything related in my searches. I’ve had my early 2011 MacBook Pro plugged into a Promise Pegasus R4 and a LED Cinema Display for about six months now and they’ve been working great. But when I added a Thunderbolt Display to the mix, the displays would flicker whenever I wrote to the Pegasus array. I unplugged the LED Cinema Display so that it was just the Thunderbolt Display and the Pegasus, and I would still get flickering when I used the disk. If I switched back to just the LED Cinema Display and the Pegasus, then things worked just fine.
I called Apple, and the first level tech support listened to me then escalated the issue to second level, and the first thing that tech did was ask me to reset the SMC. And sure enough… the problem is gone!
Now, this still leaves the issue of USB audio corruption during disk I/O, but that’s apparently a thornier issue. At least for now I can workaround the issue by using DisplayPort audio through the LED Cinema Display.
