Well, that explains the 8-hour battery life…
OK, maybe this doesn’t actually account for the rumored 8-hour battery life of the new MacBook Pros, but faithful Macenstein reader Michael reports that Apple may have decided to cut a few corners on the the new MacBook Pros. Apparently the 13 and 15-inch models are using 1.5 Gigabit SATA 1 connections to their drives, not the SATA 2 3.0 Gigabit that the unibodies of 6 months ago use.
While odds are this won’t really affect day to day performance for those buying MacBook Pros with standard hard drives, those who paid extra for the SSD drives appear to be mightily pissed and confused. Michael tells us he returned his SSD MBP when he discovered the “downgrade” in his new laptop, so whether or not there will be an actual performance hit, there is certainly a perceived one which could be almost as costly to Apple “pro” sales. Oddly, both the new 17-inch and the white MacBook retain their 3 Gigabt SATA connections.
[via MacRumors]
almost makes be glad i bought a new 13 inch macbook a month before they came out with the new models and that ‘get a free touch’ with a school purchase deal.
… ok, not at all.
curses!
wow if this is for real then that would tick me off, i wanna use SSD too
I wonder if the System Profiler is reporting the speed of the drive’s connection, rather than the maximum speed of the interface? It could be that the SSD is phyically limited to SATA1 speeds, rather than the interface itself.
This won’t affect you as badly with an SSD as with a high-speed conventional disk. SSDs have better random access performance because the seek time is lower, but the sustained contiguous transfer performance is still poorer than the fastest conventional disks.
I’m about to upgrade to a new 13-inch MBP and was discussing this issue on the apple forums last night. I just don’t get how this can be when the controller – the MCP79 – is exactly the same, or so it would seem, on all of them.
hey guys, i know im going to sound completely dumb, but i am very low on the totem pole on hardware knowledge. how would this effect a computer? i was thinking of getting a new 13 mbp, and i have the 13 mb before the leopard update. how would that be a better purchase/ not a good one? or would the gigabit affect more professional stuff on the mac? thanks guys!
Why would anyone care about this on a single drive machine? It’s meant to be a portable machine, not a raid server.
>Why would anyone care about this on a single drive machine? It’s meant to be a >portable machine, not a raid server.
Don’t you understand humans at all. Nobody wants to see a lowering of specs even if it makes no difference in normal use of the computer at all. They’re sure they just got shafted. They just know the specs show half the amount of speed and that’s enough to annoy the hell out of them. I guess they figure that their disk access is going to be half as slow or something, when it real life they probably won’t notice a difference at all. It’s all about theoretical maximum specs that make people happy in life. And now Apple has ruthlessly stolen one of their pleasures away.
I think this is one of those cases where people are looking at the spec not the performance. Kind of like complaining that the speedometer on the new sports car has been reduced from 240mph to 180mph when the speed limits are around 70mph.
By the way, I think this hardly explains the 8 hour battery life. Not even a tiny part of it.
#8 *giggles* true true!
But lets say I where the stuff the Intel SSD (225mb/s) in the new mbp, would I still get the full speed of that sucker? 🙁
How come all that information you are showing is pointing to the video card and NOT the SATA?
Scratch that, I did more research and it seems it’s all integrated stuff.
Interesting that there is NOTHING about this on the NVidia site.
Anandtech has the answer and it’s the same as “Vas the Man” has already noted: it’s the random seek/read/write that’s more important and the best achieved by SSDs at the moment is no more than 50MB/s (not 150MB/s which is the plain SATA). So, unless you tranfer really big files all the time (and where are you taking these files anyway ? USB 2.0 max speed is 60MB/s and FW 800 reaches 100MB/s, that is in theory of course) the 150MB/s cap isn’t a big issue after all.
Maybe we should ask ourselves first, would I put a 800$ drive in a 1200$ laptop, but I won’t because it won’t be as fast as it should?
Hey! It is now June 18 and you still have stuff at the top of your site from the 14. WTF? Are you dead or what? Do something!!!!!
hmm, i just got my new MBP yesterday, SATA speed is listed at 3Gigabit