HardMac follows up on the SATA II issue on new MacBook Pros

Hardmac follows up on the issues surrounding the 1.5/3.0 Gbs SATA interface on new MacBook Pros. As you’ll recall, for some reason Apple’s new high-end laptops can’t go to SATA II 3.0 Gbs speeds but instead are relegated to 1.5Gbs.  

Hardmac ran a test with two high end SSDs to see if there would be a speed increase on the top end 15-inch MacBook Pro.  The results were the same: SSDs were faster on older, slower Mac hardware.  They also tried installing diffrent versions of the MacOS on the MBP without getting a different result.  This would seem to indicate that the issue is not software related.

• WE have removed the SuperDrive and installed two SSDs. Despite that both SSDs are in SATA II format, there are limited to 1.5 Gbits/s as highlighted. We have carried out some performance tests with the Falcon SSD: 130 MB/s reading and 110 MB/s writing. This is in average 100 MB/s less that what we recorded when performing the same experiment with the previous MacBook Pro Unibody Rev 1 (MBPUR1).
• In order to eliminate a potential link to a Mac OS X version, we cloned the special build (9J3050) shipped with the new MBP 15" 3.06 GHz, and installed it on the MBP Unibody Rev1: SATA port was then identified as 3 Gbits/s.

Apple so far has refused to comment despite many attempts to find out what is going on.  We’re still hopeful this can be fixed with a firmware update, as the NVIDIA MCP79 Mobos support 3.0Gbs transfer rates.