Normal but it's not normal for the MBP to have a 1.5 in it, I find that more weird
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13" and 15" MacBook Pros Have a Slower SATA Interface
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Normal but it's not normal for the MBP to have a 1.5 in it, I find that more weird
NO...
...it is all subliminal. It does not translate into real world differences, except for the most demanding applications.. which (as has been said before) wouldn't be running on a laptop.
Subliminal? Being limited to ~130MB/sec read rate when moving a 30GB zipped folder when a drive is capable of ~230MB/sec is not subliminal. There are major real-world performance differences here.
SATA/150 aka SATA I has a throughput of 1.5 Gbits/sec, which after 20% encoding overhead, turns into 150MB/sec.
You are honestly going to try to minimize the issue by suggesting that MB Pro users "don't need all that juice" and just want it for bragging rights or something?
Wanting my $300 SSD to not be bottlenecked when copying/transferring files is hardly wanting a "huge amount of juice". SATA II controllers have been standard for 4-5 years now. It is hardly a difficult request. If this was not a mistake or firmware issue, then the fact is that Apple screwed up.
Any power savings would be insignificant. None of us really know why Apple has done this...
Speak for yourself. Decent SSDs will easily be affected by this.
So when everyone goes to USB3 Apple then should still continue to use USB 2 and claim that not everyone uses USB 2 speeds
Apple is always bragging about how much faster things are in the newer laptop but this time they put in something slower and never even mentioned it. Sort of seems like a quiet screw from behind
That is ridiculous. Besides Intel's MLC X25M drives that appear to have an issue that will probably be corrected by firmware soon, other high performance MLC drives only see a minimal slowdown over time as the drive is filled with data.
Additionally, a new SSD-specific drive controller command called TRIM is being introduced into new OS versions (including Windows 7, I assume Snow Leopard as well at some point) that tell the SSD flash controller when a certain block of bytes have been deleted from the filesystem, and so the drive is able to clear the cells ahead of time before they are written too again. This will eliminate most of the slow-down issue.
If the new MB Pros are really limited to SATA I, then Apple screwed up. Plain and simple.
Not really. If some other component goes up 0.5 Watts and the 9400M goes down 0.5 Watts than you have simply just made an even trade off.
The only folks presenting that this represents some massive megawatt change are the ones trying to knock down the change.
Clocking things slower saves power. Deny that till the cows come home you are not going to change to the laws of physics.
The warrant off the design trade-off is if you are actually taking something away that was actually being leveraged. The SATA bus speed is more so driven by having multiple devices on the shared network. Someone may have had an Aha! moment and noticed there is only one drive here.
No one will be motivated until somebody gets out a sharp pencil and says "we've got to cut power somewhere. Where can do that and have minimal impact elsewhere."
Because :
i. It is the lemming thing to do. Just follow the herd. Extremely likely was harder to do this somewhat custom mode than the run things at the canonical settings that chip is geared toward. You take chipsets that are designed to work with multiple hard drives and SATA bus saturation issues and just apply them to your laptop. If don't run into any power/thermal constraints just use them just like used in iMac or similar desktop.
ii. Megahertz Myth works. Better means faster , bigger number. When folks don't know anything about the technologies real utilization and are technologically ignorant then bigger numbers always sound better. Never mind the motivating design trade-offs involved.
It isn't like nobody has introduce faster tech which really didn't pan out of the long run ... Oh yeah that's right, Intel has completely canned their P4 design track at this point. How many Megawatts of power has gone up folks HVAC units on P4 that consumed tons of no-op cycles not really getting anything done.
iii. It is cheaper to just use a common set of components if you can get away with it. Chip vendors give you bigger discounts if buy in bigger bulk.
Again a false hypothesis of dramatic power improvements (as opposed to trade-offs and/or thermal ) being the motivating factor. Keep clinging to that; it is your lifeline.
Dramatically improving the time you can run on batteries is rather straightforwardly done by just using bigger batteries. That is one metric of battery life. (time till out of charge). If you swap out inert plastic parts ( battery case , latches , etc.) for components that consume power (e.g., batteries ) then the amount of heat you need to dissipate will go up. Not down.
Dramatically improving the lifetime can use a batteries comes from not power cycling it as much. Lower power draws lead to longer drain cycles which lead to longer useful lifetimes.
If you have other technical proofs otherwise, lets hear them.
You have EE and physics principles to back that up? Or just putting it in italics makes it true?
If you clock transitors slower they consume less power. That is what the overwhelming majority of the technical literature leads to. I'm waiting with baited breath on this dazzling proof that isn't true.
Would be nice if Apple listed the specs. on their website next to each product with a specification list. They never fail to brag about what is new and faster so why fail to mention something when they took a huge step backwards??
I too am very concerned about this revelation. However I think that it will not effect the performance in the real world too much. Maybe for SSD drives it may slow the performance slightly.
I just did a test on our network with the new Macbook Pro 13" with a 7200 rpm drive (500gb seagate) and I was able to copy 5.01GB in 1 min 14 seconds = 68MBps. Which is pretty fast as far as I am concerned.
For those into the details: Our environment is Gigabit (link aggregation on server) Intel Xserve with RAID 5, a programable network switch with Jumbo frames.
I have fine tuned our network here and the fastest i have got across it is 97MBPS using a Mac Pro with a 300gb Velociraptor (WD 10,000 rpm drive), which is well short of the 150MBps interface speed on the Macbook Pro 13".
Admittedly I have not tested SSD drives as they are way too expensive in the sizes we need for our business. (12 Macs to fit out)
So basically any type of copying from cd, dvd, usb, firewire and all network types will not come close to maxing out the 150 MBps Sata 1 interface.
So that just leaves local programs to max out the interface. Anyone have any experience of a program that will max out the interface locally apart from a program to test interface performance???
I just did a test on our network with the new Macbook Pro 13" with a 7200 rpm drive (500gb seagate) and I was able to copy 5.01GB in 1 min 14 seconds = 68MBps. Which is pretty fast as far as I am concerned.
For those into the details: Our environment is Gigabit (link aggregation on server) Intel Xserve with RAID 5, a programable network switch with Jumbo frames.
I have fine tuned our network here and the fastest i have got across it is 97MBPS using a Mac Pro with a 300gb Velociraptor (WD 10,000 rpm drive), which is well short of the 150MBps interface speed on the Macbook Pro 13".
Admittedly I have not tested SSD drives as they are way too expensive in the sizes we need for our business. (12 Macs to fit out)
So basically any type of copying from cd, dvd, usb, firewire and all network types will not come close to maxing out the 150 MBps Sata 1 interface.
So that just leaves local programs to max out the interface. Anyone have any experience of a program that will max out the interface locally apart from a program to test interface performance???
No, in Australia, the base model pro is still the same cost (~$3750.) That is, $3200 for the base model (the new model with the integrated graphics IS NOT a price drop, it's a new and inferior model), and then $680 for AppleCare (required, I've had my MBP fails on me too many times for me to ever contemplate not getting Applecare.)
Ridiculously overpriced. Also, my $150 phone can phone as many colours as the MBP screen (262,000.)
Also, don't think Apple including Firewire is at all a feature enhancement. It isn't. They took it away for no reason, now that it's back, it's not a feature upgrade, it's Apple fixing a mistake they made.
Apple messed up, there is no way at all to defend them downgrading a system.
Poor argument. Before, MBPs used to have BOTH of these.
iTunes content isn't full HD. Not everyone has lots of fast internet available. Enough said,
Doesn't matter how few people use ExpressCard, it's far more useful than an SD card slot. Especially on a $3700 computer. As for the 17 inch? I don't want to be paying $4500 just to be able to get a 6 bit colour anti glare screen.
If true and cannot be fixed, then this really blows chunks. Big time.
I was going to do just that. Put in an Intel SSD extreme for my new MBP 15 inch.
I was going to do just that. Put in an Intel SSD extreme for my new MBP 15 inch.
Exactly.
Apple and it's seemingly mindless defenders always use the same old arguments.
Like "research has shown 91% of MBP users don't use the Expresscard slot", or "Macbook users typically aren't professionals, so they don't need firewire", and on and on.
Look, we pay a premium for your computers, Apple, so we want them to be the best they can be.
I don't know if I've ever often used the "{" or "}" key on my keyboard, but if I haven't it doesn't mean I wouldn't mind if you took it away.
Just give me a full-featured, up to date computer, commensurate to the price you are charging, and stop doing the thinking for me as far as what I "need" and "don't need".
Of course everyone (me included) would rather have SATA 3.0 than 1.5. No question about it. But fact is that the difference between the two is neglible, even when using fast SSD's.
If you want computer that are "the best they can be" you would have computer that cost 3-4 times as much as they do now. That's basically what happened with the ol' UNIX-workstations in the nineties. Sun, SGI, Digital etc. didn't cut corners anywhere, and the end-result was that the machines cost a lot of money. A lot. There comes a point when getting any meaningful improvements to the machine would cost a lot of money.
No, this feature (or lack of it) is probably not due to money, but some other things. But you are basically demanding that Apple must have a feature that would not really improve performance at all. It's like complaining that your expensive stereo-system didn't come with cable-elevators, regardless of the fact that cable-elevators do NOTHING for the sound-quality. Sure, in some audiophile-theories, separating the cables from the floor offers theoretical improvements to sound-quality, in reality there is no difference. Same thing here. SATA 3.0 has twice the bandwidth of SATA 1.5, but the actual real-life performance-benefits would be nonexistant (when using normal HD's) or minor (when using hi-end SSD's).
Sure, SATA 3.0 would be nice. But I wouldn't lose any sleep because the Mac has SATA 1.5.
So you demand features that offer no real performance-benefit in order to "commensurate the price they are charging"? By that logic you should also demand that the sheets of aluminium must be washed by unicorn-tears before machining. Hey, it offers no real benefit, but it would be nice to have, right? To "commensurate the price of the laptop"....
This "I want what I paid for argument" is so tiresome. Notwithstanding the original premise that SATA 3.0 has no real-world difference over 1.5,
if you don't like what's available just let them know with your dollars. Don't buy the thing.
If you don't like the hardware offerings, just use something else. Additionally, what you think you deserve for the price you pay is up to the individual. It's just my opinion but for the price you pay for a macbook pro, we should all get mag alloy cases, accidental care coverage, and Arrandale earlier than anyone else but that's just not going to happen.
It's something you have to live with as a consumer of a closed-platform computer.
if you don't like what's available just let them know with your dollars. Don't buy the thing.
If you don't like the hardware offerings, just use something else. Additionally, what you think you deserve for the price you pay is up to the individual. It's just my opinion but for the price you pay for a macbook pro, we should all get mag alloy cases, accidental care coverage, and Arrandale earlier than anyone else but that's just not going to happen.
It's something you have to live with as a consumer of a closed-platform computer.
I'm not defending Apple, and also think this slower sATA stinks, but I think some differentiation is in order here.
Hardware vendors need to make choices for their customers which features and hardware to include. If a feature is (almost) not used, then it needs to go for another feature that is highly requested and will boost sales. After all, Apple is in this for the money.
There are many people that have been screaming for a card reader for a long time and Expresscard is on its way out. This sATA matter is different though, as I cannot imagine that a faster sATA would take up much more space on the logic board, or would be massively more expensive..
So if 2 out of 500,000 (0.0004%) people leveraged the ExpressCard slot it would still be good design principle to keep it?
Even in a context where folks through various means of additional express numbered 400,000 out of 500,000 were leveraging a SD slot?
Both hypothetical user numbers but absolutes, "no matter what", are preconceived conclusions. Not design trade-offs.
The ExpressCard going off and the SD card coming on do not have to motivated by the exact same set of factors. Where people get themselves all twisted up is believing that is true.
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