2012 MBP 15-inch — SATA Performance with Both 6G Ports

2012-07-08 • SEND FEEDBACK •
Related: backup, diglloydTools, DiskTester, laptop, MacBook, MacBook Pro, Macs, Other World Computing, RAID, SSD

The June 2012 MacBook Pro 15" (non-Retina) has dual 6G ports that are both reliable for use with 6G SATA SSDs, unlike the prior model, which was hit and miss for the 6G port in the optical bay.

[Unfortunately, the new MacBook Pro 13" model seems to have regressed, with the optical bay SATA port proving unreliable for 6G operation.]

The reliable 6G operation for both the standard drive bay port and the optical drive bay port means that a RAID-1 mirror, or two high speed internal volumes are other possibilities useful for many field scenarios. For example:

• A RAID-1 mirror for fault tolerance (e.g., to continue working if one drive fails, without any data loss or interruption);
• Two separate volumes, one for system/apps and one for data.
• A convenient internal volume for a Time Machine backup or clone backup.
• Overflow storage for photographers or videographers.

You can have it all set up and done for you as an MPG Pro Laptop.

Testing

Using the OWC Data Doubler, I installed dual OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G 240GB SSDs, one in the standard drive bay, and the other in the optical bay.

The results show ultra-high performance for compressible data, so high that it is probably beyond the needs of anything but the most extreme demands.

Writes for incompressible data (the worst case) still are at levels well beyond the ability of most applications to use, and incompressible readers are only modestly affected (for most uses, read speed is generally far more important than write speed, since most data is written only once).

DiskTester is part of diglloydTools. The DiskTester fill-volume test writes 1000 equal-size files to the drive, then read/verifies the data.

DiskTester fill-volume test for 2 X 240GB OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSDs