Apple SATA Down June 15, 2009
Posted by cuyler in Hardware, MacBook.trackback
There are concerns this week that the SATA bus speed on the new MacBook Pro 13″ and 15″ models have been downgraded to 1.5Gbs. Strangely, the MacBook Pro 17″, the MacBook Air and the even the white MacBook still run at 3.0Gbs. No one seems to know why this change was made as the MacBook Pro chipset has not changed since the last revision and it should be capable of handling the higher rate. So far, Apple has not commented on this issue.
The consensus seems to be that the lowered SATA speed should only affect users planning to install a high-speed Solid State Drive (SSD), since no hard drives are capable of saturating the SATA bus even at 1.5Gbs. AnandTech suggests that except when transferring large files, even the high-speed SSDs should not show much degradation.
Personally, I can see upgrading to an SSD next year after prices drop. I understand why people spending $600 on fast drives today are upset to learn their new MacBook Pro is artificially limiting their speed. It’s not clear why this was done and I hope Apple addresses this issue in the near future.
Update»
On June 22, Apple released an EFI firmware update that fixes the slow SATA issue. It has been just a little over a week since new MacBook Pro users discovered the problem and Apple was quick to respond with a fix. This issue has raised my awareness of problems with SSDs and I have started to investigate the pros and cons of this relatively new technology.
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