Hi. I've finally ordered a Hitachi Travelstar 7K500 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB hard drive and noticed the transfer interface is SATA 3.0Gb/s. Will my late-2006 2.33 MBP be able to operate at that spec?
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Late-2006 With SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive
- Thread starter jlin615
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The HDD will not even operate at the speeds the S-ATA 3.0Gbps offers.
The HDD is backwards compatible to S-ATA 1.5Gbps (which likely is in your MBP, you can find out via System Profiler > Hardware > Serial-ATA).
The new HDD will offer TOP speeds of 95MB/s, maybe even a little bit more than 100MB/s, S-ATA 1.5Gbps offers approx. 148 MB/s, S-ATA 3.0Gbps double of that.
The HDD is backwards compatible to S-ATA 1.5Gbps (which likely is in your MBP, you can find out via System Profiler > Hardware > Serial-ATA).
The new HDD will offer TOP speeds of 95MB/s, maybe even a little bit more than 100MB/s, S-ATA 1.5Gbps offers approx. 148 MB/s, S-ATA 3.0Gbps double of that.
Thanks! So my generation of MBP is SATA 1.5Gbps spec, where as the newer MBP's are SATA 0.0Gbps? And both the HD and computer need to have SATA 3.0Gbps in order to work in SATA 3.0gbps mode?
Yes, newer Macs have S-ATA 3.0Gbps interfaces, and those are needed to take advantage of devices with the S-ATA 3.0Gbps interface.
But to repeat myself again, any platter based HDD can not even fully use the S-ATA 1.5Gbps interface, as platter based HDDs are slower than that interface allows.
If you put HDDs into a RAID though, S-ATA 3.0Gbps is the better choice. The same goes for SSDs, which fully saturate the S-ATA 1.5Gbps interface and need the S-ATA 3.0Gbps interface.
In short: HDDs are not capable of even saturating the S-ATA 1.5Gbps interface, does the S-ATA 3.0Gbps interface is not needed. Also S-ATA 3.0Gbps is backwards compatible.