MacOS – Recover deleted files from MacBook Retina’s SSD

You can erase free space using Disk Utility. (/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app).

In the sidebar of Disk Utility, select “Macintosh HD” (or the drive where you’d originally stored the file). At the top of the window, select the “Erase” tab. Towards the lower left-hand corner of the window, there’s a button labelled Erase Free Space. This lets you overwrite all of the free space on the drive (which is where your deleted file currently resides). You can choose a one-pass, three-pass or seven-pass erase — hopefully that’s more than enough. And if not, I guess you can just do it multiple times.

As always with Disk Utility stuff, be a little careful. I did this a couple of years ago with a three-pass erase, something screwed up and I had to restore from a backup :(

Is your MacBook Pro the MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2.53GHz, Mid 2009) model? That model of MBP had a known issue where it would constantly beach-ball with non Apple drives. There was a firmware update available but that hasn't fixed all units.

From personal (and professional) experience I've found upgrading to Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6 fixed about 50% of the time, all other units had to have an official Apple drive fitted to fix the issue.

Basically your only options are to upgrade to Snow Leopard (I'm unsure of whether Lion includes the relevant firmware updates) or complain to Apple so much that they give you a replacement unit. Ugh.