New MacBook drive controllers slower than old ones

The transfer rate of new MacBook Pros’ drive controllers tops out at half that of the previous generation: about 110Mbps in benchmarks. It won’t matter much unless you upgrade to expensive third-party SSD drives, of course, but … you know.

“Page 1 of 40” [Macrumors forums]

1. [David Anderson]

   I wonder if perhaps this is only true of the 13-inch and lower-cost 15-inch Macbook Pro models. Perhaps those models with the dual graphics controllers also do SATA 2.

2. [tros]

   With the return of FireWire, I’d be willing to bet that it’s some electrical issue that prevents both FireWire 800 and SATA 3.0Gbps from running together on the current board design.

   Not that it matters anyway. What’s really bottle-necking the new MBP is the user whining about it.

3. [Capissen]

   This…doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. On modern notebooks, the controller is built into the chipset. At last glance, all nVIDIA chipsets support SATAII. I’d be willing to bet there will be a fimware or chipset microcode fix for this in the near future. Maybe some engineer just forgot to turn 3Gbps back on…