Updated 28-4-11 15:07

A further update, courtesy of some helpful fellas over at  Overclockers. Have a look at this blog post from OWC. Interesting stuff. They go as far as to offer a shielding kit too..... but on the other hand, they also say this:

So it may, or may not help? I think I’ll stick with SATA II speeds for now.

Updated 28-4-11 13:23

It’s been an interesting time with my 2011 MBP. As I mentioned in this post, it’s not been all plain sailing. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a very powerful unit and incredibly capable - but there’s just been the odd annoyance.

Now, one that’s relevant to this post (SATA III support) is my general perception of the performance of the SATA III based C300. I was aware that a number of people had reported issues using SATA III based SSDs in the 2011 refreshes. Personally, I didn’t think I’d experienced the problems....but lately, I’d not been so sure. I now I know. I had.

The machine was fast as anything however somethings felt like they were constrained. For example, opening up a big Excel sheet - Excel would fire up instantly but it would pause for a couple of seconds before opening the actual sheet. Same with Word. Also, I’d switched away from Firefox to Chrome as I’d found the performance in Firefox becoming frustrating - I tend to have maybe 30 or 40 tabs on the go. This started to eat away at me - this can’t be right?

Well, it was simple enough to check. I happened to have a Crucial M225 128Gb SSD available to test against. So, I Carbon Copied the C300 to the Crucial, and popped in the Crucial to the 17” pro and tried working from that. Wow, what a difference. Perceived performance issues with FFox - gone. Pause on Excel/Word openings - gone. Fluidity of performance - back.... Happy to solve it, disappointed to think I now have a 256Gb SATA III SSD that I can’t use in my work hack.

Before I got completely disappointed and full with rage, something occurred to me. The SATA connector for the SuperDrive is a SATA II (I.e. 3Gbps) connector, not SATA III. I also have a second hard disk fitted in that SuperDrive space. It occurred to me then that it would be a valid test to put the C300 in the OptiBay, and the physical 750Gb drive in the normal bay. Admittedly the C300 would only be operating at SATA II speeds, but hey....

Well, it works just great. The fluidity is back, there’s no pauses - and the machine rocks. So, I have a temporary solution that works. In addition, it also means I can put my 1Tb 2.5” (12.5mm) unit hard disk back in - this didn’t fit in the OptiBay.

I’m happy again - I’ve got my fast beast of a machine back. Hopefully they’ll fix the issues with the SATA III performance, after all, you want every last piece of performance you can have right?

incidentally, my next step should putting the unit in the OptiBay not work, was to try turning off the OSX TRIM hack to see if that was having an effect. I didn’t think it would since I was running that same thing on my Mini & Air, all SSD equipped. So far, it seems like it’s not necessary. Here’s hoping.

Original Article 3-3-2011

I recently wrote an article about the new 2011 Macbook Pro I had picked up recently. So far, it’s going great - very, very fast and incredibly capable.

Now, one of things I noticed with the system is that the profiler seemed to indicate that the one of the channels supported SATA III (or 3). Firstly, just to be clear on terminology as it can be a little confusing:

SATA II (2): Up to 3Gbps connectivity

SATA III (3): Up to 6Gbps connectivity

On some of the forums the terms SATA 3 and SATA 6 are being used to refer to the 3Gbps and 6Gbps offerings respectively. Worth double checking if there’s any confusion.

Anyway, the profile indicates that 6Gbps SATA III connectivity is supported.

One thing to watch out for though, is that only one of the channels supports SATA III, the other is SATA II only. In the above screen shot you can see I have the first Intel port selected - in the lower part of the screen you see this:

If I select the other channel (the bottom one), I see this:

Notice it’s 3 Gigabit and not 6? This caught me out a bit. I obtained a Crucial C300 RealSSD unit (more about that in a second) and I was planning on having that in my OptiBay (a drive tray in replacement of the SuperDrive) - in addition, I have a 1Tb Samsung physical drive that I was going to keep in the normal hard disk bay.

Nice idea, didn’t work out though. The OptiBay channel is on the SATA II (3Gbps) channel, not the SATA III - so if I wanted the higher performance I had to put the SSD back in the proper place. Fine, put the hard drive in the OptiBay you may think? Oh no - the 1Tb units are 12.5mm (as opposed to 9mm) so it wouldn’t fit! Oh woe is me etc. etc. repeat until someone feels sorry for me.

In the end I put a 750Gb physical drive in the OptiBay. Still, a nice setup!

So, let’s look at those drive statistics:

Pretty impressive. Even in SATA II form an SSD will revolutionise your machine. In my original article the videos are made with the Vertex2E in place.

So what difference has the SATA III unit made? Well, in general operation individual apps feel just as fast as the SATA II units. Everything is snappy, everything is immediate - no more bouncing dock for me. Does it feel faster than the SATA II units? No, not really.

What I have noticed though is my machine doesn’t slow down as much when it’s under load from lots of Virtual Machines. My guess is that’s where the higher performance really comes in to its own - loading.

The Xbench stats on the SATA III unit are below:

The one below is for my previous Vertex 2E:

What about Windows’ performance index?

Well, this shows the performance index running on the SATA III C300:

Disk rating of 7.8 - impressive stuff. The previous one on the SATA II based Vertex 2E is below:

A whopping .1 difference on the primary hard-disk. Yes, I can confirm that that indeed was sarcasm.

The story under BootCamp is similar. Firstly, the SATA III based C300:

The following shows the configuration for the previous Vertex 2E:

So a .1 in virtual, and a .2 in physical. Doesn’t seem right does it? Still, I will vouch for the fact that the unit scales better in terms of performance that the previous Vertex 2E - other than that the performance is pretty much the same as with the Vertex 2E.

As a side note, I can see the Memory operations per Second is different between the two tests - both run in Boot Camp. How odd?

Summary

What to take from this? Well, if you have a quality SATA II based SSD then the upgrade to a SATA III based unit probably isn’t worth the investment. If however you’re thinking of going from good old spiney drives to an SSD, it makes sense to get one that supports the SATA III (6Gbps) interface doesn’t it?

The video below shows the unit in action.