Hot answers tagged sata
10
YES, it's definitely worth it. With my setup, sustained transfer speeds were roughly 75% better using SATA, vs. USB3.
I tested both configurations using ZoneBench as follows:
SSD: 120GB OWC Mercury Electra 6G
Mac: Late 2012 Mac Mini, 2.6Ghz core i7, model ID Macmini6,2, 16GB RAM
Hot-Swap unit: StarTech USB3-to-SATA dock, model SATDOCK22U3S ver2
All ...
8
They are pretty much the same. The only thing that differentiate SSD with a flash is the fact is housed in a big case. And the MacBook Air flash memory is attached to specific card inside the MacBook Air.
To save space for starters (there is simply not any space left for a real SSD) and I thought is served better cooling too.
6
What is the benefit of using flash memory in the Macbook Air?
How does the use flash memory compare to SSDs? What are the benefits?
The Macbook Air uses an SSD. Apple markets it as merely flash memory because in the consumer market there are only two storage types - flash and hard drives. The typical consumer Apple is aiming for does not know what ...
6
SuperDuper! doesn't create the Lion Recovery partition on the new disk so Carbon Copy Cloner is a better choice for cloning to an empty drive.
If you use SuperDuper, you'll need to reinstall Lion afterwards to create the recovery partition. It's a non-destructive reinstall so all your data and applications are preserved (although it still sounds scary to ...
5
It turns out that there is SATA 3 on board, it just wasn't enabled until 4 May 2011. The Other World Computing blog has the details:
While iMac EFI Update 1.6 is described
as including “fixes that improve
performance and stability for
Thunderbolt,” it would also seem that
an unadvertised benefit is that it
also unlocks the full 6Gb/s, SATA 3.0
...
5
There seems to be a lot of confusion about the Air's Storage.
The Macbook Air comes with an SSD which uses an custom mini-PCIe/mSATA connector also found in some Dell and ASUS computers.
Some notebooks (notably the Asus Eee PC, the MacBook Air, and the Dell mini9 and mini10) use a variant of the PCI Express Mini Card as an SSD.
The connector on the ...
4
The genius of the unibody construction is that Apple can cut out all of the protective cases that normally are built around commodity parts to achieve much denser, lighter and slimmer products without sacrificing durability of the product.
By eliminating (or severely honing to a minimum) the protective cases around the battery and the mass storage drive ...
4
I have the low-end MBP 15'' early 2011.
It has a SATA3 interface. As I have a SSD build-in, the negotiated link speed is 6Gb/s as well. Benchmarks achieve speeds of up to 510 MB/s, which is clearly SATA3.
Also, make sure that you have the latest firmware installed. The early 2011 MBP received firmware updates which enabled full link speed (as of revision ...
3
It has two and yes, you can make the controller that connects to the SuperDrive spot the primary controller and run your MacBook Pro exclusively off a drive attached to this controller.
I'm writing this from a MacBook Pro that has an SSD installed into the SuperDrive spot using an OWC DataDoubler bracket. This is the primary drive in my machine and the ...
3
Yes,
... because there are other advantages besides the faster access times.
SSDs work inaudible
SSDs are shock-resitant
SSDs use less energy but the total impact is very little...
SSDs max out the SATA 1 throughput, which your old HDD will probably not.
Also, you might get a SSD and then use it in your newer Mac which you will buy in a few years. Make ...
3
SSD is just marketing speak. Solid State Drive. It implies that it's a seperate component unit with all the stuff you usually associate with a drive - power connectors, SATA data connectors, a physical form factor which provides an indication of where is can be used (2.5" SSD, 1.8" SSD etc).
The storage in the Air is not a "drive", it's just storage. It ...
3
As already mentioned, size was the reason, you can't put a case inside a MBA, no room for it. However, despite the fact that most SSDs use NAND-based flash memory, there's another thing in the SSD Drives that the MBA doesn't have "next to it", and that is the controller. The MBA obviously has a controller for the drive, but possibly not in the same ...
3
1. Flash memory is the technology, not the product.
Everyone has seemed to focus on the size aspect, but "flash memory" is really just the technology, and not really an end product. It is used in both USB storage and SSDs (the difference being the quality of the NAND memory) and it was just unfortunate that the name got tagged along and automatically ...
3
They've had SATA 3 (6Gb/s) since switching to Sandy Bridge early 2011. I'd say get the SATA 3 SSD if it doesn't cost much more.
If the combination of memory chips and controller inside the SSD itself can't supply data as fast as 3Gb/s, you won't ever max a SATA 2 connection. However, some current SSDs are starting to approach the real world limits of SATA ...
3
OWC has tested it and confirms that..
...the MacBook Pro 15” (2012) has two drive bays, each capable of running an OWC 6G SSD at full 6Gb/s speeds.
which is the SATA Revision 3.0 speed.
They've also setup a striped RAID which benchmarked at "over 1000MB/s read speeds and write speeds that nearly hit 900MB/s".
Regarding the Macbook Pro 13" (2012), OWC ...
2
I don't have a 2011 iMac, however you can trust the statement from OWC that you linked in your question.
They bought one, took it apart and unequivocally state that there is NO SATA 3 support.
Since they sell the Vertex 3 and the industry is moving towards SATA 3, it would not be in their commercial interest to make this statement were it not true.
2
I'd highly recommend looking at Other World Computering for this purchase. I've purchased an SSD from them and they were awesome in helping me figure out which one would work best. They have great sales and support. They have a nice option of looking at what is compatible with your mac.
2
This has really been answered already, but the MBA's drive is an SSD, and it is just SATA. Apple simply removed the casing and traditional SATA connector to make a smaller interface and drive.
It's nothing out of the ordinary, just a custom form factor and socket to save space. Just like the RAM is DDR3, but not a SODIMM.
2
I think you're on the right track with iosnoop - but perhaps fs_usage will get to the nub of which specific files are being accessed.
Start with sudo fs_usage -w and you can grep for things or perhaps find a stable PID to filter on. If the processes are coming and going too rapidly to track, you might need to fire up instruments or dump the launchd database ...
2
This is one of those questions where the only valid (enough) answer is "it depends ...".
We can begin with your question about whether using a Crucial M4 SSD is "worth it" in your MacBook.
No, it is not.
As you pointed out, your MB only supports SATA I with a max throughput of 1.5 Gbit/s. It makes no kind of cost/benefit sense to pay the premium for a ...
2
SATA I is still going to be an enourmous speed increase on your existing spinning drive.
I upgraded to a SATA III compatible drive in my iMac, which only supports SATA II, and initially the auto speed negotiation for my particular drive controller resulted in only acheving SATA I speeds - and it was still a huge improvement. I got it up to SATA II speeds ...
2
In this case:
The Toshiba TS256C is operating at its fastest factory designed speed.
Basically, you bought an Apple computer with an SATA III (6Gbps) interface and an SATA II (3Gbps) Hard Drive, and an SATA I (1.5Gbps) optical drive. If you were to buy a different model of SSD or ODD that is SATA III rated for speed you could take advantage of the 6 Gbps ...
2
Yes - at the moment - those link speeds are the theoretical maximum speed at which data can transfer to or from those devices.
The EFI firmware version on your MacBook Pro controls these link speeds as well as many other aspects of CPU throttling, so without reverse engineering that code - it's hard to know what or why the link may re-negotiate at a ...
2
I have a mid-2012 (unibody, non-Retina) MacBook Pro 13" that I retrofitted with an OWC Mercury Electra 6G SSD, and my System Profiler reports
Link Speed: 6 Gigabit
Negotiated Link Speed: 6 Gigabit
So perhaps mine is faster than the OEM drive in your MacBook Pro.
1
Your Macbook can have as much as 3GB of RAM. Check it first.
Buy an Optical Disk Drive to HDD adaptor on ebay (9.5mm PATA to SATA variant). Put you HDD there.
Crucial is good. 64GB is enough for me, SATA150 and probably you. Small read/writes are same between different sizes and you will not get those faster linear RW anyway — why pay more when you can have ...
1
I've got the next newer model with a an OWC Mercury Electra 120GB SSD and 6GB of RAM. The disk performance is roughly doubled but it's far short of a new MacBook Air/Pro with an SSD. However, there is a caveat. I get pauses that last 20-30 seconds on a regular basis (say once an hour). I've never figured out the cause but it happens much more frequently ...
1
I'm not sure if its the same kind of SATA controller, but Other World Computing sells something they call the Data Doubler for certain types of Macs. It's a drive bracket that sits in the SuperDrive slot and supplies a second 2.5" drive bay using the SuperDrive's interface.
The bracket contains a small ICB, but I'm not sure if it's converting anything to ...
1
It is not just lion, it is on every OS I have installed and on multiple laptops and systems I have purchased from various vendors.
I haven't actually had a PC that could let the disk sleep for 10 years now. Every PC I have owned has the same problem. Constant disk access at specific intervals but no software debugger can capture or show what is doing the ...
1
Tracking down the executed commands can bo done with sudo execsnoop -v.
In this case the results were:
2012 May 12 17:05:53 0 15465 161 sleep
2012 May 12 17:06:13 0 15467 15466 ps
2012 May 12 17:06:13 0 15468 15466 awk
2012 May 12 17:06:13 0 15469 161 sleep
2012 May 12 17:06:33 0 15472 15470 awk
2012 May 12 17:06:33 0 ...
1
It is a variant of Mini PCI Express & mSATA:
Some notebooks (notably the Asus Eee PC, the MacBook Air, and the Dell mini9 and mini10) use a variant of the PCI Express Mini Card as an SSD. This variant uses the reserved and several non-reserved pins to implement SATA and IDE interface passthrough, keeping only USB, ground lines, and sometimes the core ...
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