A question. A mechanical HD can't saturate the 1.5GBps bus but the SSDs can. However, looking at the numbers for the random write tests, the reported speeds are only down in the 10-20MB/s range anyways. And isn't the random writes test the one that everyone is supposed to care about, the one that indicates the most "real" performance? Therefore, how big of an issue is it really if the SSD saturates the 1.5Gbps bus in sequential reads/writes, but is still far, far, from saturating the bus in the more indicative tests? Upgrading to a SSD will still give you a significant speed boost, just maybe not quite as fast as if you had a faster SATA bus?
Just seems like all of a sudden sequential read/write speeds are everybody's business now huh.
If anything, it's a reason not to invest in the expensive Intel drives as the speed benefits would go unrealized?
Just to be safe though, I think I should cancel the Corsair 256GB SSD order I placed earlier today... it hasn't shipped yet and is probably easier to cancel now than try to send it back once shipped. Still though, I think even if this turns out to be an unfixable thing, upgrading to a good SSD should still give massive speed benefits as many SSD speed tests still are far from saturating the bus.
BTW my MBP13" ("high end" model) is reporting 1.5GBps SATA speed with stock 250GB HD. I think the people at the apple store are bogus when they say some have 3.0GBps and some don't. That just doesn't make any practical sense. I'm also not entirely sure I believe the engineering team saying they deliberately reduced the speed on the SATA bus too, as that doesn't make any sense either. They're probably just providing an answer to a very concerned caller because they don't think "We'll look at this more closely" is a good thing to say.
Ruahrc
