Adding SATA 3 to MacBook Pro 5,1 (Mid-2009)

[benweston]

Hi all

I have a 15" 2.8 GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro Mid-2009. Generation 5,1.

It has a Mini PCIe slot for the AirPort Wi-Fi obviously and I have recently installed a 512GB Samsung 830 SSD. It works fine but is obviously limited by SATA 2.

My question is whether 1) the Mini PCIe slot is fully-functional and 2) whether the EFI bootloader will recognise a SATA 3 card if I put one in there? I'd try to find one with the same chipset as that used in later MacBook Pros that OS X has the drivers for.

I could run Wi-Fi off a USB port instead.

 

[snaky69]

Hi all

I have a 15" 2.8 GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro Mid-2009. Generation 5,1.

It has a Mini PCIe slot for the AirPort Wi-Fi obviously and I have recently installed a 512GB Samsung 830 SSD. It works fine but is obviously limited by SATA 2.

My question is whether 1) the Mini PCIe slot is fully-functional and 2) whether the EFI bootloader will recognise a SATA 3 card if I put one in there? I'd try to find one with the same chipset as that used in later MacBook Pros that OS X has the drivers for.

I could run Wi-Fi off a USB port instead.

In real day to day usage you'd be hard pressed to see an actual difference running your SSD on SATA II or III. You'd probably see one in benchmarks, but apart from making your e-peen bigger, it wouldn't do much.

You're willing to sacrifice a bit of portability by having to carry around an extra dongle for the sake of an improvement that is not likely to yield any tangible results in real usage situations?

 

[benweston]

In real day to day usage you'd be hard pressed to see an actual difference running your SSD on SATA II or III. You'd probably see one in benchmarks, but apart from making your e-peen bigger, it wouldn't do much.

You're willing to sacrifice a bit of portability by having to carry around an extra dongle for the sake of an improvement that is not likely to yield any tangible results in real usage situations?

Not really - the difference between an SSD running at 250 MB/s read and 450 MB/s is quite noticeable actually! Especially as I use VERY disk-intensive apps.

And I would solder in a USB Wi-Fi dongle inside the laptop to avoid having to carry it around

 

[T5BRICK]

There isn't exactly a lot of space to be routing cables inside there. If you want SATA III, you ought to upgrade to a newer laptop.

On a side note, SSDs only max out the SATA II/III bus when they're doing sequential transfers(hint: most operations don't do that). Your 4k read/write speeds will a larger effect on most tasks. The Samsung 840 Pro has awesome 4k speeds.