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Apple addresses SATA issues on new MacBooks
Apple has made quite a few announcements in recent weeks. While most of the focus was on the iPhone 3G S, the company also refreshed its MacBook Pro line during this year’s WWDC, with several upgraded features on the 15" model and a re-branding of the 13" model. Unfortunately, for some reason, Apple also decided to downgrade their SATA II drive interfaces to the original SATA specification in the process.
The move didn't affect the performance of traditional platter-based hard drives, which are rarely fast enough to saturate the 1.5 gigabits per second link SATA allows, but may well affect users who upgrade to a Flash-based SSD. However, following a flood of complaints on Apple’s support discussions and elsewhere, this artificial cap appears to have been removed with the new MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update 1.7.
Affected users can download the firmware update here, which is 3.35MB in size and requires Mac OS X version 10.5.7. We should note that since the extra speed can only be seen with drives that Apple itself doesn't use, the company warns that it can’t provide official support for drives that take advantage of this patch.
The move didn't affect the performance of traditional platter-based hard drives, which are rarely fast enough to saturate the 1.5 gigabits per second link SATA allows, but may well affect users who upgrade to a Flash-based SSD. However, following a flood of complaints on Apple’s support discussions and elsewhere, this artificial cap appears to have been removed with the new MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update 1.7.
Affected users can download the firmware update here, which is 3.35MB in size and requires Mac OS X version 10.5.7. We should note that since the extra speed can only be seen with drives that Apple itself doesn't use, the company warns that it can’t provide official support for drives that take advantage of this patch.
