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#1 2009-06-22 5:10 pm
Apple gives you your Macbook Pro SATA speed back
http://gizmodo.com/5300174/apple-releas … face-speed
We reported earlier that it looks like the new MacBook Pros have had their hard drive controllers downgraded. Now, Apple has released a new firmware update to jack those speeds back up.
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#3 2009-06-23 9:19 am
- wellfleation
- High on Life
- From: Metheun, Mass.
- Registered: 2001-11-13
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Re: Apple gives you your Macbook Pro SATA speed back
Told ya so
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#4 2009-06-23 5:49 pm
- Bat
- Flawless Cowboy
- Royal Wombat
- From: Björk, Björk
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Re: Apple gives you your Macbook Pro SATA speed back
Still... why wasn't it there on launch?
If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion - George Bernard Shaw
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#6 2009-06-24 5:53 pm
- Mr. T
- Best of both worlds
- From: omnipresent
- Registered: 2002-04-02
- Posts: 4214
Re: Apple gives you your Macbook Pro SATA speed back
MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update 1.7 addresses an issue reported by a small number of customers using drives based on the SATA 3Gbps specification with the June 2009 MacBook Pro. While this update allows drives to use transfer rates greater than 1.5Gbps, Apple has not qualified or offered these drives for Mac notebooks and their use is unsupported.
Not that I care about the SATA incident (I've already given Apple the benefit of the doubt), but why must Apple always be so defensive about everything? Why not just say "We've addressed a SATA speed issue" and leave it at that?
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#7 2009-07-10 8:54 pm
- Tom_N
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- Registered: 2002-01-24
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Re: Apple gives you your Macbook Pro SATA speed back
Bat wrote:
Still... why wasn't it there on launch?
Maybe because current hard disks aren't fast enough for SATA-1 transfer speed to be a bottleneck? (There are some solid-state disks that can push data at faster rates.)
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#8 2009-07-10 11:53 pm
- Bat
- Flawless Cowboy
- Royal Wombat
- From: Björk, Björk
- Registered: 2001-05-14
- Posts: 28541
Re: Apple gives you your Macbook Pro SATA speed back
Yes, it takes an SSD to really need the speed. It was/is in other products, tho, including the previous MBP. Support is easy enough to include as shown by the EFI update. Trivial, really, and Apple markets itself as the best. It should, and now does, have it.
All unibody MacBook/MacBook Pros use NVIDIA’s GeForce 9400M chipset. The chipset includes native support for up to six SATA ports running at 3.0Gbps (300MB/s max transfer rate). Here’s a copy of OS X’s system profiler showing 3.0Gbps as the interface speed on the previous generation MacBook Pro:
..
All three of the SSDs in the table above would be interface limited on the new MBP because of their high sequential read speeds. If you were copying large files from the SSD in your MacBook to a similarly fast device, the transfers could take longer. I doubt the performance difference would be significant or noticeable in real world notebook usage, but it doesn’t change that there’s no reason to take a step backwards like that. In the coming years we’ll see more drives that can consistently break 150MB/s; Apple artificially limiting performance today would just hinder progress.
If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion - George Bernard Shaw
"Fire up a colortini, sit back, relax, and watch the pictures, now, as they fly through the air."
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