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back to article Apple hikes MacBook SATA speed

Remember the MacBook SATA degrade, meaning affected MacBooks could only operate SATA at 1.5Gbit/s, potentially slowing down SSD MacBook Pros? It's been fixed in a somewhat grudging manner by Apple. The MacBook Pro EFI firmware update 1.7: "allows drives to use transfer rates greater than 1.5Gbps, Apple has not qualified or …

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  1. James Smith 2
    Paris Hilton

    Makes no difference

    Hello,

    As the drives will be limited by their write speeds to probably around 30-40MB/s and read speeds of probably around 100MB/s (SATA) (real world stats, not distorted manufacture figures), it makes no difference at all what the interface is capable of.

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  2. James O'Shea
    Jobs Halo

    Exactly

    That's perfectly correct. In the real world, there is no practical difference in performance for current hardware. But now the Windows bleaters will have to shut up about this 'problem'.

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  3. Dr Richard

    @Makes no difference

    But it is nice to have the choice and a bit more future proofing ... remember the batteries in the new Macbook Pro's could last up to 5 years and that is around the average age for Apple kit to be still really useful. Before then SATA II SSDs should be cheap enough for an easy upgrade.

    Bit of a shock Apple giving us choice so easily though 8-)

    Can't wait to get home though, now that UPS have this morning delivered my new Macbook Pro ... backlit keyboard, aluminium uni-body ... mmm sweet ... only have to wait for Snow Leopard now!

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  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    This can't be right

    This story makes no sense. All the Mac clansmen posting comments on the original article were adamant that it was already fast enough, faster than a Dell in the real world in fact, and better value for money! Why on earth would Apple need to speed it up if it was already so perrrrrfect?

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  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @Makes no difference

    Raw IO speed is not the be all and end all of disk performance, what about the total IOPS? This may well be higher, I don't know if it is, just saying mind, but in the real world you tend not to saturate the drive's bandwidth but fire off lots of IO requests.

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  6. James O'Shea
    Jobs Halo

    re ac 13:05

    it's just this: in the real world you will see no practical difference with current hardware before and after applying the firmware update... but you will see Windows bleaters moaning about how slow Apple hardware is _even though they have never actually so much as touched a Mac_. Now that the firmware patch is available, they don't have a reason to bleat anymore. As AC 13:05 demonstrates, they'll bleat anyway, but they're Windows bleaters, that's expected... and now they have no support for their position.

    The firmware update served two purposes:

    1 if, in the future, actual real-world hardware could make use of the full theoretical bandwidth available to SATA II, then the by then elderly MBPs would be able to use those drives, too. By that time there will be newer, faster, more powerful machines, and those who need speed will be using them, so the people actually using the old machines probably won't bother upgrade anyway, so the point will be moot.

    2 it denies Windows bleaters easy propaganda points.

    Reason (2) is by far the most important.

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  7. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Shame there is no eSATA too

    To attach high speed RAID arrays to edit HD video.

    Even my 250quid Toshiba NB100 has dual purpose USB 2.0/eSATA ports.

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  8. Eric Hood

    eSata

    eSata is a stopgap measure that will probably disappear once USB 3.0 appears, in the same way PCI-X has disappeared and is replaced by PCI-e.

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  9. Nordrick Framelhammer

    So let me get this right...

    The SATA II specification has been out for close to four years and yet Apple are still having problems with implementing this standrard?

    How long will it take them to do the same with the SATA 3 standard?

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  10. Oninoshiko
    Coat

    @Eric Hood

    PCI-X has disappeared? You better call my vendors who are sill selling cards for it, and main-boards with it....

    or was the suppose to be ironic?

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  11. Eric Hood

    Card slots

    @Oninoshiko

    As you can still buy main boards with ISA slots I spit on your argument :) , ok, PCI-X is obsolescent not obsolete and the same will be true of eSata, there is enough gear supporting it to keep it it going for many years to come.

    When USB 3 starts arriving people will move to that as they are already familiar with USB and given the ubiquity of USB will probably be cheaper.

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  12. Aaron 10
    Troll

    Hmmm...

    The troll is strong in this one...

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  13. Jeffrey Nonken
    Headmaster

    Hmmm

    Maybe I've misunderstood some of the comments but I'll risk looking like an idiot.

    The drives Apple sells won't be able to take advantage of this, true. But that's not true of some third-party drives.

    Solid-State Drives are MUCH faster and in fact will max out a SATA-II bus without breaking a sweat. That's why the SATA-III spec is coming out ahead of schedule; they hadn't anticipated the speed increase so soon. It would be a shame to put an SSD into your Mac and only get an incremental speed increase, negating at least half the reason for buying it in the first place. (The other part being that it's not subject to the same kinds of failures that rotating discs are. OK, you also get lower power draw, so maybe it's only 1/3rd. Still, the actual fraction depends on your own priorities.) You may not be able to get the full bandwidth it's capable of, but at least you'll now get double what you got with a stock drive. Plus of course zero seek time, mechanical immunity, and lower power draw.

    P.S. Thanks, El Reg, for the new icons.

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