I recently bought a Corsair Force LE 240GB SSD and tried to do a net recovery on a macbook pro A1278 (MacBook Pro 13" Early 2011 with i5) to the latest El Capitan, but for some reason, this is only possible if it is connected via USB (as an external drive). As soon as it is connected internally instead of the standard HDD, it does not show up in disk utility and can't be used as startup disk or location to where the OS should be installed.
I cloned the working version of my HDD to the SSD, but when it is booting internally from the SSD (which now has a working version of Mac OS X on it), it freezes as soon as the progress bar reached 100%. It sits there for over an hour (I canceled it at that point always). Booting from the same drive externally boots into a clean working version of El capitan without any problems.
Judging from what I read online, a possible issue might be that the internal SATA cable doesn't support SATA III, which is used by this SSD. Before I go and buy a replacement cable, I would like to make sure there isn't another problem that could also cause this.
I have so far only tried net recoveries, and am currently downloading the OS image to burn it to a USB and try from there again. This is to eliminate errors that might come from a broken OS file (my Internet connection sometimes stops working).
Update: Also a recovery from USB with the internal SSD brings the same problems.
The drive itself works flawlessly on Ubuntu 16.04 and Windows 10, both as external and internal drive.
Best Answer
The problem was the internal SATA cable. After exchanging it - this is quite an easy operation, there are plenty of videos on Youtube that describe exactly how it's done - the drive booted flawlessly and is running at a negotiated link speed of 6 Gigabit.
To make sure an SSD will work with a Macbook, the Link Speed of the SATA controller should be checked in
About This Mac > System Report > Hardware > SATA/SATA Express