* Posts by Jordan 4

1 publicly visible post • joined 15 Jun 2009

MacBooks afflicted with SATA 'degrade'

Jordan 4

Rotation vs Bandwidth

While this won't affect people with standard harddrives (Not even in benchmarks...), SSD will feel a pinch here, slightly. That's only the fastest SSD's btw... I don't even think Apple offers those.

My only question is "Why bother?" The SATA II chips are more than likely cheaper than the older versions, as is usually the case with any slightly older tech vs newer tech - DDR is more expensive than DDR2 and DDR3 is bleeding edge so it's more expensive than both.... But SATA I should be pricier than SATA II - unless Apple has a warehouse of the old style chips and found it would inch their profit margin a bit more... which in that case I don't see why they don't just charge more considering that's what they normally do.

But remember - SATA and even SATA II vs even ATA IDE doesn't change the speed of access for a drive. It changes the bandwidth (which if the ATA IDE is just on it's own cable is not affected by this), but a regular HDD is always limited by it's rotational speed, which hasn't seen an improvement since ATA100 (there are some 10k SATA drives but they are not popular, average is 7200rpm and in notebooks it's usually slowed down to 5400rpm for power saving features.)

At 5400 RPM you can't even dream of using ATA100's bandwidth - and that's the average speed in these notebooks - you can upgrade to a 7.2k RPM disk, and then you'll see a difference, but it will be completely unnoticed when going from SATA I to SATA II