SATAII on the new MBP

[joshuakarjala]

As an owner of the mid 2009 15" MBP - I have read a lot about the troubles people trying to upgrade to SSD's have had with the SATAII interface of their notebook.

Has anyone gotten one of the new i5/i7 and tried out various 3rd party drives?

I'm looking to upgrade to this new revision - but wan't to be sure that I can upgrade to 3rd party drives later.

 

[Hellhammer]

I can't 100% confirm but can't see why 3rd party drive wouldn't work. Some SSDs don't work well with Macs and '09 MBPs had SATA2 limited to 1.5Gb/s but a firmware update fixed it back to 3Gb/s

 

[joshuakarjala]

I can't 100% confirm but can't see why 3rd party drive wouldn't work. Some SSDs don't work well with Macs and '09 MBPs had SATA2 limited to 1.5Gb/s but a firmware update fixed it back to 3Gb/s

The problem was that though this firmware update allowed SATAII - there were still stalling issues and IO errors. These were reported to be due to a poorly shielded SATA cable running to the drives. Several users were able to fix the problem by manually shielding or replacing the cable.

 

[Maximus434]

The problem was that though this firmware update allowed SATAII - there were still stalling issues and IO errors. These were reported to be due to a poorly shielded SATA cable running to the drives. Several users were able to fix the problem by manually shielding or replacing the cable.

I also heard a possible bottleneck could be the voltage, the sata controller was initially underclocked by apple to preserve battery life, and the 1.7 update didn't address that.

I'll have my 15" i5 by Friday and I'll be opening it immediately to install my 120Gb OCZ SSD. If it doesn't work, the MBP is going straight back.

 

[mdnz]

I also heard a possible bottleneck could be the voltage, the sata controller was initially underclocked by apple to preserve battery life, and the 1.7 update didn't address that.

I'm not quite sure if that was the reason. An SSD uses way less energy than a traditional hard drive.

 

[m85476585]

I'm not quite sure if that was the reason. An SSD uses way less energy than a traditional hard drive.

The drive power is not the same as the controller or interface power. The controller will take more voltage to run faster, and a faster signal might take more voltage to transmit reliably. The drive has its own power connection which is completely independent from the controller power.