Does the Late 2009 iMac i7 have dual channel SATA II?

I know there is a 3Gb/s SATA2 connection to the internal HD and a separate 3G SATA connection to the optical drive. But are those two SATA connections on separate channels?


To clarify, I am wondering if I can get greater than 3G speeds in a late 2009 iMac by putting an SSD in the HDD slot and another SSD in the optical drive slot. If there are 2 channels, then I would have the theoretical capability of a 6G SSD if I put the two in a RAID configuration.


Thanks.

iMac, OS X Yosemite (10.10), Late 2009, 2.8GHz i7, 16GB RAM

Posted on Nov 13, 2015 11:00 PM

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66 replies

Feb 6, 2016 2:43 AM in response to JDW1

no not really I bought this machine at the apple online store, the first mac pro had the flickering graphics, which I return and the second one has the slower PCI Flash drive I am just surprise why this fluctuation of hardware one with a problem in the graphics this one with a slow flash drive. Sometimes I wonder what is going on in the mass production line in Apple.

Feb 6, 2016 2:58 AM in response to Switch900

Speed tests reported by other 2013 Mac Pro owners:


https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5850156?tstart=0


Barefeats Benchmarks:


http://barefeats.com/hard197.html


YouTube video from a 2013 Mac Pro owner:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoPUN0QsHZw


Don't settle for anything less, especially since you bought direct from Apple.


Oh, and about the video issues on the Mac Pro, I just spotted the following article posted just today:


http://www.macrumors.com/2016/02/06/late-2013-mac-pro-video-issues-repair-progra m/

Feb 6, 2016 3:38 AM in response to JDW1

if I would of known I would of hold on to the first mac pro, now I have a mac pro that shows a slower SSD what the **** is going on this is like a cat and mouse game I have to be on top of what is going on with the hardware like if we are some sort of electrical engineer with all kinds of testers and benchmark to see if all is working to optimization.....

Feb 7, 2016 1:59 AM in response to JDW1

I did some investigating and found out that apple uses two different type of Flash drives for their components by two different companies, One of them is Samsung and the other is Sandisk, guess which one is the fastest, if you said Samsung you guess right, your iMac 5K skylake has the samsung drives that is why your iMac and my mac pro of older technology was running up and very close to your iMac in flash drive speed. The difference and I saw this difference when I was at the apple store is that your logic board controller is of a much later generation I think its User uploaded fileyours has a link speed of 8.0 GT/s because I checked it out in the apple store when I was returning my first mac pro with that flash drive speed that was close to yours, and now I have the Sandisk which is much slower drive way much slower, the new Samsung drives that are in the mac pro that are being produce now, is a recent generation flash drive, that is why there is a differences in speed, should I ask the apple guy to just switch the 256 flash storage drive for the samsung I think yes, I should because its not fair that apple to save cash stocks up on several companies components like this and having some computers with slower performance. This is a practice that apple does with the recent iPhone 6S they have two different chips and they perform differently, I am mostly sure that your flash drive is the same that was in my first mac pro that is why you was so surprise that my mac pro with being two years old and your recent iMac 5K with skylake processor were so similar in drive speed. The reason why your was still higher was because of the PCI Controller which your has a much faster link speed.

Feb 7, 2016 4:09 PM in response to Switch900

On the one hand, I know why Apple does that. They don't want all their eggs in one basket. If one supplier fails, they've got a backup. But the downside is big, just as you so accurately describe, insofar as you get better performance from one vendor and lesser from the other. Apple contends that such differences are not noticeable. But that would depend on the user, I think.


In any case, the New Mac Pro will of course be great in many ways. I just wish they would make them more cost effective. It's not like "pros" are the only people who want a pro machine. I'm willing to pay more for something better, but it must be affordable for a family man like me. No doubt that holds true for many Apple product lovers worldwide.

Feb 7, 2016 11:07 PM in response to JDW1

yeah but being this a pro machine your expecting it to work with top notch performance. It is clearly shown how the SSD disk speed on one machine was insanely fast close to your recent iMac 5K Late 2015. Just the SSD alone made the machine run much faster, but at the same time it was kind of finicky. This one works more stable. Lets see how the saga goes with this machine I will keep you updated. On this mac pro.

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Does the Late 2009 iMac i7 have dual channel SATA II?

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