MBP 13" and 15" bad news about SATA

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Relativist

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Turns out that the MBP 13" and 15" seem to have been downgraded in SATA speed from 3GB/s to 1.5GB/s.

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=718516

So far no big stories about this. Also there's speculation about this being able to be fixed via firmware, which might be the case.

I've thought about it, and unless there is a really good reason for the downgrade, I'm not upgrading like I planned on.
 
Sucks that Apple seemed to cheap out on their parts, but I'll wait for the official news regarding a possible fix before I buy. Though the jump from 1.5GB/s to 3GB/s won't make a huge difference (if any) in terms of speed with platter-based drives, removing the option seems silly.
 
I can see why they did this I believe

Using SATA I would cut down costs right? and for HDDs they won't come close to saturating the 1.5GB/s limit

However I believe that if you choose the SSD option that they offer, you'll have your drive utilizing SATA II 3.0GB/s
 
My 2.2GHz MBP hard drive also appears to be running at 1.5Gbps. And it's a replacement drive I know is 3.0Gbps I bought from Newegg.
 
The issue is, some notebooks appear to be using 3.0GB/s, while some of the same models are running at 1.5GB/s, so it's more than a cost-cutting measure.
 
You should only care if you want to spend $400+ on a fast SSD now, or one later - platter drives can't catch up anyway.
 
Most of these points have been covered in that other thread. It does not make sense, $ wise either, since it's also on the 15" MBP. Yes some older MBP's still had 1.5G, but since they switched to the 9400m chipset, it comes standard with SATA 2. This is a strange happening. BTW, I don't agree that it's a limited problem, because SSD's might end up becoming standard for hard drives, especially with recent trends of price drops and better performance.

I was going to buy one of the new MBP's and put in a small/fast SSD for my boot drive and swap out the optical drive for a 500GB platter drive. Now I'm not so sure, I'll continue to wait for the next gen CPU like I had planned on before. Apple almost had me with the innovation in battery life...
 
It's probably for power savings, as some links from there provided.

By the time SSD's become standard, we'll be on another revision of MBP. That's a few years away still - right now, most people (me included) have no interest in paying $800 for 250gb of space, when we can get 320gb of fast-enough storage for $70. I can't even justify it for a desktop - a pair of velociraptors, or even one, is fast enough, and costs less.

You're in an even extremer minority if you're thinking about swapping out the non-removable optical in the MBP for something else. :p And crazy too.

Me? I'll be ordering a new 13" MBP as soon as I get back from India, and buying a 320gb 5400 or 7200 rpm disk to go in it and not caring what the SATA speed is - there's no chance I'll ever spend money on an SSD for a laptop - I personally think it's a waste.
 
if it means a hundred dollars off, i'll take 1.5 over 3 all day long.
 
I think this is more about forcing customers to buy an SSD-equipped model than buying the stock version and upgrading yourself. Either way, this is a step backwards for Apple & they should be ashamed.
 
Scroatdog said:
I think this is more about forcing customers to buy an SSD-equipped model than buying the stock version and upgrading yourself.
Click to expand...

Or, it's a cost and energy savings move. That 8 hours of battery life doesn't come from nowhere.

Remove the tin foil hat. :p
 
These difference in cost of these chips is what, a few pennies? Or at most a few dollars? Maybe if they have unused stock, then sure it's free. Energy savings, that is speculation, some would argue that if it's slower slightly data will take slightly longer to transfer and potentially negate energy savings. This part uses very little energy compared to other parts, and we are talking a difference in the SATA 2 part vs the SATA 1 part. There is no justification, maybe some snobbish designer somewhere that has a lack of imagination on how people use their systems?

The extra battery life comes from a bigger battery for the most part, and some more aggressive energy settings. I agree that there might be something going on with SSD's, but there has been no confirmation that the MBP's that come with SSD's are SATA 2.

BTW, MR has put a front page story:

http://www.macrumors.com/2009/06/14/13-and-15-macbook-pros-have-a-slower-sata-interface/

Oh, and about what I said about the optical drive, it is actually easy to do, there is an adapter out there that goes right in for the previous gen MBP, and there's an expectation of it bieng made to be compatible with the new MBP. Note that the memory and HD are user upgradeable on MBP's now.
 
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It's not speculation. Running the chips at the higher clock frequency required for SATAII operation requires more power. This is basic physics - moving the gates in a transistor requires power, and the faster you move them, the more power it takes. Data will only take longer during sustained transfers - burst transfer rates will be largely unaffected, and idle time for the bus will have a higher load with the chip at full speed.

The battery life increases exceed the battery size increases - this may very well be them cutting corners to save a few watts to get there.

It may be easy to pull the dvd drive, but imho, it's silly. I'd much rather have an optical drive - I use it quite often. And to be honest, the majority of sales for these aren't even considering that. You're an outlier.

Fact is, the majority of consumers don't need SATAII out of these. I do wish we'd had a choice, but it's not going to affect my buying decisions. I have no interest in SSD, and I want the battery life and compact form factor.
 
InorganicMatter said:
Or, it's a cost and energy savings move. That 8 hours of battery life doesn't come from nowhere.

Remove the tin foil hat. :p
Click to expand...

we also don't have proof that the ssd equipped models come with the 3.0 interface.

It's the same chip folks, only set to a lower rate.
 
Couldn't they have an option to enable/disable it like you can switch between the graphic cards?
 
lopoetve said:
we also don't have proof that the ssd equipped models come with the 3.0 interface.

It's the same chip folks, only set to a lower rate.
Click to expand...

This is an interesting choice though, especially not advertising the 17 with a faster bus. I know my nforce4 ultra is the exact same chip as the nforce4 sli. the only different is a resistor telling it to disable sli and report as an ultra. I think that was known from the start though.
 
As noted by one poster at the MacRumors forum, it's amazing that Apple loves being on the forefront of the latest technology and loves to harp on performance, but then they shoot themselves in the proverbial foot by doing something like this, hamstringing the performance potential when people decide "Hey, I want to put an SSD in my machine, and I spent an arm and half a leg on it, now I find out the <insert dollar amount here> I spent on this supposedly high performance Mac laptop is a bit of a waste since Apple decided to cut me off at the knees and limit the speed at which my SSD can operate? WTF man..."

Apple-sauce... they're just mushing everything up these days... can't wait to see how they fuck up the iPhone 3GS when it's released, which I'm sure will get noted all over the place just like this pooch screw with the SATA. It's always something...
 
Well, hopefully it's a setting in the EFI, which it could easily be, and the controller is a SATA 2 running at 1.5GB/s to save energy or, more likely, make energy saving strategies for a platter drive easier to do, and hopefully it can resume full speed operation when an SSD is installed.

As for the suggestion I'm an outlier and optical drives are used all the time, I don't think that's correct, look at the MBA for proof. And all the posts on Macrumors of people suggesting to remove the optical drive from the MB. Apple does not even put an optical drive on their Apple TV. Why? because they believe in downloading, not getting disks in the mail. either way, it's besides the point. Hopefully we Apple will clarify this SATA issue sometime soon.
 
Relativist said:
As for the suggestion I'm an outlier and optical drives are used all the time, I don't think that's correct, look at the MBA for proof. And all the posts on Macrumors of people suggesting to remove the optical drive from the MB. Apple does not even put an optical drive on their Apple TV. Why? because they believe in downloading, not getting disks in the mail. either way, it's besides the point. Hopefully we Apple will clarify this SATA issue sometime soon.
Click to expand...

The Air is for a rather limited market, imho. If it was a common option, apple would offer it as an option on the MBP as-is. And Macrumors folks are almost ~all~ outliers too - me included - I'm comparing against your average joe off the street, or student sally on her way to college. They're not looking to have a fast boot drive and a slower storage drive - they're looking for a laptop with all the "normal" features. Of the millions of these they'll sell, only a small fraction will be to people that think about swapping out drives like that. :)

Two hard drives in a laptop is far from what your average joe commuter wants - and as the video pointed out from the original uMB launch, the MB and then the uMB were Apple's most popular computers.

They didn't put an optical drive on the TV because it's just an itunes front end, not a DVD player - no reason to spend money on a dvd player when everyone already has one, and thus also avoid the licensing fees. At least, so I'd expect- I haven't seen the TV selling a lot though.
 
Power saving measure. It's not a cost saver at all. And its a software setting, so I presume someone somewhere will figure out how to change it in the future.
 
Methodical said:
Power saving measure. It's not a cost saver at all. And its a software setting, so I presume someone somewhere will figure out how to change it in the future.
Click to expand...
did you test this out yourself? nothing has been proven yet...
 
So many theories, but also so many people convinced of them already. I hope apple makes a statement and sets things straight.

The only thing I am certain of is that there shouldn't have been a step backwards in this spec to begin with, for the sake of battery life or not.
 
haha so very true.
However with this current issue we have hardware out in the wild already. Hopefully someone with the technical knowledge to back up any explanations runs some tests and arrives at some useful conclusions soon. But an official word from apple would be preferable.
 
Some info from Anand:
http://anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=3582
Apparently, Mac OS X gets 26% better battery life than Vista on these new batteries, and the copy of Mac OS X shipping with the laptops is a new build that no one has seen yet, so obviously something is going on under the hood. More importantly is page 2, where they say the SATA difference has no real-world performance impact. Like we've already said, Anand attributes the SATA speed differences to power savings.
 
I could see this not affecting real world performance if SSD drivers were below SATA1.5 speeds, but they are not. And they are only getting faster too. You better hope they give you a way to unlock it if you plan on taking advantage of SSD speeds during the life of your $2000 laptop.
 
Considering they have already spec'd out SATA 6 as of may 29th 2009, ya, this could be a big issue, not everyone buys a new macbook every year when a new model comes out so i can see in 1-2 years people replacing the harddrive for more performance and then BAM! sorry! slow speeds, sucks to be you, but typical apple, force your hardware on people because you nutter it in the first place.
 
bdr529 said:
I could see this not affecting real world performance if SSD drivers were below SATA1.5 speeds, but they are not. And they are only getting faster too. You better hope they give you a way to unlock it if you plan on taking advantage of SSD speeds during the life of your $2000 laptop.
Click to expand...

The 17" has 3.0 - did anyone find out if the 2k 15" has 1.5 or 3.0?
 
MrGuvernment said:
Considering they have already spec'd out SATA 6 as of may 29th 2009, ya, this could be a big issue, not everyone buys a new macbook every year when a new model comes out so i can see in 1-2 years people replacing the harddrive for more performance and then BAM! sorry! slow speeds, sucks to be you, but typical apple, force your hardware on people because you nutter it in the first place.
Click to expand...

I believe you were looking for "neuter", as in, chop ones' balls off - not nutter, which is slang for a crazy person, or might be related to throwing peanuts.

;)
 
lopoetve said:
I believe you were looking for "neuter", as in, chop ones' balls off - not nutter, which is slang for a crazy person, or might be related to throwing peanuts.

;)
Click to expand...

LOL, what happens after a long day or work and benchmarking the same dam thing over and over, brain goes a little numb.
 
Yes the 15" is also at SATA 1, which is why I do no believe it's a cost cutting measure. From other various things I've read, it's looking more like it's a setting, but so far nothings been confirmed that I know of.
 
And for those sticking with the "it's a power saving measure" I disagree. Seriously, while there may be some truth to it, the actual amount of power savings would be so minuscule it would require several digits past the decimal point on paper to even exist, really. Considering the drives are designed to work at a given speed rating, the controller is designed to work at a given speed rating, this is just a bad idea all the way around and back twice over upon itself.

People will say "Oh, this gives me 10 mins more battery life" but I'd say "If the drive was working as fast as it should be, and the controller too, I'd have been done with my work 20 mins ago and still have that 10 mins of battery life and several more to go..." Dreaded car analogy:

If I put 10 gallons of gas in a car with a solid 30 MPG on the highway, it doesn't matter if I drive 60 MPH or 30 MPH to get that 300 miles - it'll use the same amount of gas to get there, and I'd rather get it done faster. It's a MacBook Pro for Pete's Sake... it's supposed to be high performance and able to do this as fast as possible...

It's another case of Apple just shooting themselves in the foot.
 
except in your example, use is constant (driving) - on a computer, unless yuo're streaming files to somewhere, HD use isn't constant - it's random, and the random transfer of an SSD isn't capable of saturating the 1.5 bus. So yes, if you're just copying a 300gb file sure, it'll get done faster. Normal use? Not so much :)

and it does matter - no car gets the same mpg at different speeds ;)
 
for the average user, this is the difference between a car going 120mph and 150mph, it doesn't matter because no one drives that fast.
 
I dont even know if this is possible but why not, everyone has their theories. What if the controller is set to some sort of dynamic setting? Like it speeds up as its needed. I mean they do have that nifty little chip that controls the power usage. =P
 
According to Engadget, you do get SATA 3 speeds if you order your Macbook with a SSD pre-installed. If you order it with a HDD, it's set to SATA 1.
 
Auric said:
According to Engadget, you do get SATA 3 speeds if you order your Macbook with a SSD pre-installed. If you order it with a HDD, it's set to SATA 1.
Click to expand...

This is basically akin to paying the Apple Tax they had on the original MacBooks - choose white, it's $1199... choose black, get a hard drive 40GB larger (120 vs 160, cost difference was roughly $8 for the hardware), a gig of RAM (cost difference about $19 for the second SODIMM), but pay $1399 for it... pretty expensive difference just for a dye job...
 
Auric said:
According to Engadget, you do get SATA 3 speeds if you order your Macbook with a SSD pre-installed. If you order it with a HDD, it's set to SATA 1.
Click to expand...

got linkage?

BTW, also, as for the theory of energy savings, SATA 2 chips might have different device size, so just doing a calculation of reactance (resistance) based on frequency isn't the whole story.

I'm thinking we'll have some answers soon, hopefully this week.
 
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