New MacBooks Pro have slower SATA connection

internal HD

With the recent update on its line of professional notebooks, Apple has made a change that does not please many of its consumers. Until now, Ma had been using the SATA II interface, with data transmission speed of 3Gb / s, on the hard drives of its notebooks. However, with the update of the 13-inch and 15-inch MacBooks Pro, users are reporting that a slower interface, SATA I (with 1.5Gb / s speed), was used.

This sudden change by Apple seems to have affected only the models unibody 13 and 15 inches. The MacBook (plastic model), the 17 ″ MacBook Pro and the MacBook Air continue to use the faster interface.

For many who use hard drives (HDD), this change will not cause so many problems, since HDDs do not have as much speed. But for those who are exchanging for SSD (flash drives), the exchange on the interface represents a significant loss of speed. Tests are demonstrating that more expensive and faster SSDs are only managing to achieve transmission rates of 1.5Gb / s in the new models, in contrast to the fast 3Gb / s that they were able to achieve in the previous generation.

O 9 to 5 Mac cites some features that may indicate that this drop in speed may be caused by some fixable abnormality in a firmware update:

  • As the MacBook continues to use SATA II, the decision was not made to reduce costs, as it should have been the first model to undergo a change like this.
  • The NVIDIA 9400M chipset, used in both generations, has SATA II interface support.
  • The interface used for the SATA I DVD drive, operating at 1.5Gb / s. An anomaly may be causing the hard drives to also operate at the same speed.
  • As they are professional machines, Apple would not have taken the decision to slow down flash drives just to save energy.

With so many complaints, Apple is likely to come up with a solution to this problem soon, soon.