SATA Speeds Slower on New MacBook Pros

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SATA Speeds Slower on New MacBook Pros

Posted 06/15/2009 at 1:34:19pm | by Arvind Srinivasan

turtle

Did you upgrade to one of the new MacBook Pros and are unsatisfied with the speed of your hard drive? Don't think about upgrading to a Solid State Drive just yet. You would think that everything would get faster with the new MacBook Pros, but apparently that is not quite the case. MacRumors has uncovered that the SATA speed of the new 13" and 15" Macbook Pros has actually gone down, from 3 Gbit/s on the older models to 1.5 Gbits/s on the newer ones.

The SATA speed is relevant to how fast you can read and write to your hard drive. The difference of speed, thankfully, will not affect traditional hard drives, or even cheap SSDs, because they cannot take advantage of the higher tranfer speeds. However, this will affect you if you were planning to upgrade to a high end SSD at any point in the future. In fact, it would almost render such an upgrade useless, because the read/write speeds would be bottlenecked by the transfer rate of the system, not the SSD itself.

The strangest part of the whole story is that Apple supported the 3 Gbit/s standard, also known as SATA II, on the older versions of the same laptop. Our resident tech-experts at Maximum PC magazine say that there is no reason such a switch should have been made - SATA II has been supported for a long time, and in fact, SATA III, which will clock at 6 Gbit/s, is due soon. They say that there is no potential battery or space savings, and the only possible difference would be that the older hardware is slightly cheaper.

Are you upset about the downgrade to the MacBook Pros and will it affect your purchasing decision?

COMMENTS: 5

TAGS: macbook pro, hard drive, sata, sata2

COMMENTS

yup they just post a
Submitted by Nekollx on Mon, 2009-06-15 12:27

yup they just post a potential costumer right here

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As much as that sucks for
Submitted by homemaderobot on Tue, 2009-06-16 09:45

As much as that sucks for the new users, it does make me feel a little bit better about getting my unibody MB back in November last year.

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Speed will only hurt SSDs?
Submitted by jackal on Tue, 2009-06-16 16:29

I thought I had read when the MacBook Air came out--perhaps even in Mac|Life--that SSDs killed traditional hard drives in the realm of random-access reads and writes (since there is no head to move) but *lost* to traditional hard drives when it came to pure sustained read/write speed. Now this article is saying that the drop to 1.5Gbps (sustained transfer speed) won't hurt hard drives but will hurt SSDs. That's conflicting information with what I've read before--unless SSDs have MASSIVELY improved their data transfer speeds since the MacBook Air came out. So, who's correct?

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Submitted by benet (not verified) on Tue, 2009-11-10 18:24

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outy

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Makes no sense
Submitted by FineTunes on Wed, 2009-11-18 10:48

I was lucky to get a 17" MBP with a 256gb SSD in April 2009, no complaints. My daughter was planning on getting the 15" with a SSD but now we are going to wait.I would like to see MacLife run an article of reviews, test and comparison of SSD's v HDD advantages & disadvantages of the two. Another article can review & compare of the available SSD's; Although SSDs do not have any moving parts, I read that they lose performance with time and heavy use--is this true? Also does the software for HDDs for optimization, file recovery, fixes and defragmentation work on SSDs?--if not, why. I have also read that SSDs will read and write faster on PC than on Snow Leopard--true?Hope Apple makes a fix on this as SSDs seem to be the future when prices come down and capacity increases.

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