Hi everyone, I've been wondering for a long time: Does the late 2012 12-Core Mac Pro support SATA III 6Gb connection? If not, is there any way of making it SATA III?
Mac Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2)
The drives will work, but at 3 Gbs. Execpt for some SSDs, you won't notice any difference.
Thanks.
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It doesn't support SATA-III drives, SATA-III drives support it.
That makes no sense. What?
The Mac Pro does not support SATA-III.
SATA-III drives are backward compatible to support the Mac Pro's SATA-II.
Most commercially-available rotating drives cannot possibly source data off the platters at higher than a momentary bursts of up to 125MBytes/sec, or about 1.0Gbits/sec. That means SATA-I speed is not a bottleneck.
A few drives are faster, and some SSD drives are faster.
Many drives available today are capable of transfers at up to 6Gbits/sec.They will operate correctly at the Mac Pro's 3Gbits sec Bus speed. But since they cannot produce data from the drive platters at those speeds, you get at most a tiny, momentary burst at that speed.
6Gbits/sec is far higher than other bottlenecks in the drive. There is no point in paying extra for this spec, as the drive cannot achieve it steady-state, and it provides no measurable advantage. I refer to such practices as "specsmanship". Feel free to read "cr@p".
The issue to me is the controller used could but us not providing 1.2Gb and 4x4TB or drives mechanical are capabke if sustained 180MB/sec.
Crippked at kess than even 800MB that is shared does not equal 300MB per SATA port and device.
Does the Mac Pro Support SATA III?
