Best COMPATIBLE ssd for NVidia MCP79 chipset?

Hi. It works!!! I´ve tried it in a Mid 2010 MacBook Pro 7,1 with a Nvidia MCP89 controller and it works at Sata II 3 Gb/s speed. At first I tried a OWC Mercury Extreme Pro with the SandForce controller and it worked at Sata I 1.5 Gb/s speed. In System Report Link Speed 3 Gigabit and Negotiated Link Speed 1.5 Gigabit. After that, I tried he Crucial MX200 and also the Crucial BX100. Sata II 3 Gb/s speed. Both. Link Speed 3 Gigabit and Negotiated Link Speed 3 Gigabit in System Report. I´m running Yosemite 10.10.5.

Thank you very much to all the people in this thread. Absolutely you all helped me. ¡¡¡Muchas gracias!!!

Here's the tested result. This works pretty well.

I've found that I like to send business to Crucial, because they have a decent upgrade selector that will give you an answer on what works with your mac.

Johan-Kr

Thanks for the confirmation Johan! I had seen some posts indicating that the MX200 didnt work straight out of the box for the iMac version of the nvidia MCP79 controller which is why I was hesitant to pull the trigger. But thankfully, we know have a confirmation that the drive works. Thanks :-)

In conclusion, we now know that for iMac versions (such as 9,1) with the MCP79 controller, the proven SSDs to run at full SATA2 speeds (3gb/s) are:
1 Crucial --> M500

2 OCW --> Mercury Electra 3G

3 Crucial --> MX200

Hope this helps others that are in a similar position! Cheers to all :-)

Oops - it seems like I forgot to mention a little detail....

The drive I got was a BX200, not an MX200. According to Crucials site, the MX200 should also work. I figured the extra speed wasn't anything that my machine could make use of anyway, so I saved the $25 in extra cost for the MX.

I've also installed three Crucial MX100s for customers of mine. Two ordered the upgrades, and the third one was supposed to go in my machine, but a customer with a failed HDD needed an urgent fix, and that was what I had on hand.

When I got around to order myself a new one, I ran into these controller issues with the Kingston HyperX.

Johan-Kr

Ok, thanks!

EDIT

In conclusion, we now know that for iMac versions (such as 9,1) with the MCP79 controller, the proven SSDs to run at full SATA2 speeds(3gb/s) are:
1 Crucial --> M500

2 OCW --> Mercury Electra 3G

3 Crucial --> BX200

Possible compatibility:

1 Crucial --> MX200 (likely)

2 Crucial --> MX100 (unlikely)

3 Crucial --> BX100 (not recommended)

Hope this helps others that are in a similar position! Cheers to all :-)

The Crucial MX100 also works.

Johan-Kr

In case someone want to search for alternative, I just bought a Transcend SSD (http://id.transcend-info.com/Products/No-735) for my Macbook Late 2008 with Nvidia MCP79 chipset, and OS X Yosemite. I got full speed (3gb) link without any problem. I can see on the website that they support Apple Product pretty well, there's a combo pack that helps apple user (http://www.transcend-info.com/apple/jetdrive420/)! I also enable the trim force. The blackmagic disk speed test result is around 206mbps for write and 260mbps for read, I'm happy so far, booting only need 6-10 seconds.

I recently installed a crucial MX300 525G ssd (Hdd bay) on my iMac 9,1 20" 2.66Ghz iMac and the negotiated speeds where at SATA I speeds of 161 Mbps. I can't get it to do SATA II speeds. I'm running on the El Capitan 10.11.6

Looks like the new crucials are not automatically going to SATA II.

Same problem here.

Crucial MX300 installed in optical bay on a 10.1 late 2009 Imac with the MCP79 Chipset.

Link Speed: 3 Gigabit

Negotiated Link Speed: 1.5 Gigabit

I was just comparing the different SSD controllers on this site http://www.johnnylucky.org/data-storage/ssd-database.html

If one of the earlier posts is correct and the following drives work at full SATA2, it was interesting to note that the

1 Crucial --> M500 uses the Marvell 88SS9187

2 OCW --> Mercury Electra 3G uses the JMicron 562

3 Crucial --> BX200 uses the Silicon Motion SM2256

Even though the root cause of these issues is with the MCP79 chipset, maybe using a drive that has a controller that plays nice with the chipset is the key?

The MX300 I have only achieves SATA1 and it uses the Marvell 88SS1074-BSW2

Might see if I can return the MX and swap to a BX series....

There even seem to be differences among MacBooks and iMacs using the same MCP79 chipset. It appears to be hard to really predict whether an SSD will work at full SATAII speed or not since I've already read different statements on whether Crucial's BX100, BX200 and MX200 work at 3Gbits or not. As it seems, some MacBook (Pros) are less problematic than iMacs.

Today, I received my 275GB Crucial MX300 and it works flawlessly in my Late 2008 Macbook Alu Unibody in contrast to the two iMacs mentioned before. So you might as well wanna give it a try in case you own a MacBook/Pro since it is even cheaper (at least here in Germany) that the BX200 and way faster in terms of sequential writing speed for large amounts of data.

SanDisk SSD Plus 480Gb SDSSDA480G work 3Gb/s on MCP89 Macbook Pro Mid 2010.

Hi guys

I have an iMac 21.5 late 2009.

Just wanted to confirm that I switched my ODD drive with Plextor M5Pro SATA III drive and it's working fine on a 3Gbit bandwidth. I'm quite pleased with that 🙂