Replace hard drive cable: macOS crashes, MacBook freezes randomly
This subject gets its own article because I have searched quite a bit for a solution. Maybe this helps you when you experience the same MacBook behavior. You can find the replacement part here:
Aliexpress: new hard drive cable for MacBook - check for your model number and year!
My MacBook Pro is already a few years old, but always ran stable. In the last few weeks though OS X crashed and the MacBook froze randomly. As I use it mainly for surfing the net, I thought the browser was the culprit. But all reset tricks did not help. The freezes just happend without and reason, only a reboot resolved the issue - until the next crash. Exchanging the RAM modules didn't help either. Worst thing was, that the error was not reproducable: sometime it ran for hours without issues, sometimes it needed a few times to boot or was freezing every thirty minutes.
After I tested even the harddrive externally (it was ok) I was surfing Aliexpress for MacBook spare parts out of frustration. I found a hard drive cable for around 10 bucks. "What the hell." I thought an bought one. The last reason for this strange behaviour was a defect on the logicboard, so this would be kind of a cheap fix.
So I openend my Macbook again (iFixit) and exchanged the harddrive cable. It is a bit glued on and also is connected to the IR sensor and standby LED, so do the job with a bit of patience. The necessary kinks in the cable, that you have to bend yourself to fit the internal shapes of the unibody topcase I made a bit rounder that originally. Hopefully the stress on these parts is now a bit less and has a positive impact on lifetime.
Result: all problems gone, MacBook runs good as ever. It seems that the wiring in the cable is so thin, that it can break over time. So if you got a MacBook with the same strange behavior, have a look at your cable connecting harddrive and logicboard.