13" MBP SATA interface downgraded to 1.5 Gigabit

CTB: I guess the real question is about the drives themselves. I trust them that the system now supports SATA II, but I'm not sure I believe that their SSD drives are SATA I. A quick look at NewEgg.com (who carry many SSD drives) shows that 89 of their drives are SATA II while just 7 are SATA I, and those are all old drives with smaller capacities.

I wonder which drive manufacturer would make a 256GB SSD (which is obviously a fairly recent product based on its capacity) but would only use a SATA I interface. Seems unlikely no?

Very curious to hear what you see in your systems. I'm particularly interested in the exact model of the SSD drives you find in your systems and in benchmarks. If you have the time, it'd be great if you benchmarked your 15" MBP BEFORE applying the firmware update and AFTER... 🙂 That would really be insightful.

CTB please do so. Appreciate it!


As for Apple fixing it, i am quite relieved. I'm also looking forward for people with SSDs to post up tests before & after update.

Thanks,
Andrei

Well, I installed the 1.7 Efi, but the system hung after booting.
so after about an hour (well, close to 55 minutes) I gave a reset.
Nothing
reset and pram reset
and it booted again as it should do.
But now my uMBP 13" freezes for 30s to 45s when it gets a high CPU load.
Any ideas?

Weird....how would this be related to the SATA fix i don't understand, especially the high CPU loads that lead to freeze.

Anyone else experiencing any of those symptoms?

well, it got even worse, I noticed the temperature getting high and then I found out the fan was blowing 2001 rpm with a temp of 89C/around 190F
That is no good.
But that would make sense that under high cpu loads it freezes until it cools down, gets hot, freezes... etc

Tomorrowmorning it goes back to the store it came from.

Message was edited by: AlecGold

Message was edited by: AlecGold

I have a week old CTO 13 inch pro (with SSD HD) that works fine. I have no attention to apply the firmware and wish the software update wouldn't pop up automatically. Sure I ignored it but how many people know what it really is and will install it and potentially have something go wrong when they didn't even need it to start with? ....

Haricot,

Is your SATA interface already at 3 Gigabits?

OOps I meant "intention" 🙂

And no, the MBP came with a 1.5 gig interface even with the Apple SSD installed. Until I know the reason why Apple decided to downgrade it to 1.5 gig I'm not installing any firmware upgrade. With Apple there's often a good reason for their original decision to start with. Not sure why they decided to make the firmware update pop up instead of having it downloaded separately for those having a need for it...

Haricot, could you please let us know which exact SSD you got from Apple? I've been trying to figure that out forever and no one has published that information.

I'm curious to check whether that drive has a SATA I or SATA II interface...

NVidia MCP79 AHCI:

Vendor: NVidia
Product: MCP79 AHCI
Speed: 1.5 Gigabit
Description: AHCI Version 1.20 Supported

APPLE SSD TS128A:

Capacity: 113 GB
Model: APPLE SSD TS128A
Revision: AGAB0202


Here. Hope it helps.

Thanks Haricot! That's actually completely useless because your drive is actually branded internally as an Apple SSD drive! This is rather unusual -- almost all pre-installed SSDs (from Lenovo, etc.) are always simply third party drives that would report their original manufacturer.

Could Apple actually be purchasing MLC chips and SSD controllers and manufacturing their own SSD drives? It seems unlikely.

Still, we are in the dark regarding the actual interface employed by these drives. I'd bet they are SATA II but that contradicts their statement from the firmware upgrade...

Yeah, I wondered about that. Well the only way to be sure of the vendor would be to open up the case and have a pick... I'll pass. At least for now 🙂

PS according to post #5 of this thread http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=588540 it is a Samsung

Message was edited by: Haricot

That's perfectly understandable Haricot... Please let us know if/when you change your mind... 🙂

One thing I'd love to see is a benchmark of this drive, preferably before and after the firmware upgrade, but I'll settle for a "before" if you don't plan on installing the update. By the way, I must say I am confident the update is very low-risk considering the earlier MacBooks/MBPs (late 2008 unibody) were based on the exact same chipset and ran at SATA II.

Anyway, any kind of benchmark numbers would be great!

(check my PS in my previous edited post)

As far as benchmark goes... Send me the link of a benchmark program to download and I'll post the results later today. Got to go now.

Guys!!! So after all is the performance bottleneck for SSD people fixed or not?

I mean from all the silence in the thread since the firmware update was released i tend to think it was fixed, however no one that had problems, that posted countless screen grabs with the issues and whining is not replying anymore.

COME ON! Is it so hard to do a test of performance to see if it was improved?! Also no stability comments?

That's right as soon as smth goes wrong everybody screams but if things are resolved people forget to lay a hand anymore.