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Hi, Thank you in advanced for dedicating your time in reading this. I am not a power user, but I need to backup loads of GBs from time to time, and recently I upgraded to OS X Sierra, my MBP became really slow. I am planning to upgrade my Mac with an SSD HD but as I have been reading, it won’t support SATA III (6GB), only SATA II (3GB). Is this correct? If so, I could mount for example an OWC Electra 3G SSD and run it without issues, like heating, slow access and so on? In addition to SSD installation, might I need a hard drive IR cable or it won’t be necessary? Thank you once.
It can be confusing! Your system has two SATA drive ports: HD Drive bay & Optical drive bay. What you have discovered is the ports data rates supported are different! The HD Drive bay port can support a SATA III (6.0 Gb/s) drive, and the Optical Drive bay port can only support a SATA II (3.0 Gb/s) drive! So you can replace your current HD drive with a SATA III SSD drive! But, we have a fly in the ointment here! Apple used SATA II drives in this series and then upgraded it at the very end of the series run as the newer SATA III drives as they were easier to get. So if you still have the original drive it likely is a SATA II drive! So why does this matter? The SATA cable Apple spec’ed originally was not able to support the faster SATA III drive, Apple rev’ed the cable to a better design. But they soon learned the maker of the newer cable messed up so it was rev’ed again and then still again! So you really need to replace the cable when you upgrade your drive to be safe! Here’s the cable you’ll need: MacBook Pro 13" Unibody (Mid 2012) Hard Drive Cable and yes! Its for the 2012 model, this is the best cable Apple spec’ed. Even still there are some issues we want to improve upon. You want to apply a strip of electricians tape on the uppercase where the cable sits to help protect it from the rough aluminum surface as we have discovered it tends to abrade the cable damaging it! Your Hard Drive Cable Is A Ticking Time Bomb The second issue is putting it in, a lot of people tended to fold a crease in the cable where it needs to bend around a corner. This in turn damages the cable! What we need to do is create a radius arc! Not a sharp bend as the sharp bend damages the thin foil wires within the cable. I use an old BIC pen ink straw to help me form the arc as a bending brake. Using it I can form the needed bend. Here’s the guide to put it in MacBook Pro 13" Unibody Late 2011 Hard Drive Cable Replacement OK, so that’s all the details on replacing your primary drive with a new SATA III drive HDD or SSD. So now lets look at the optical drive bay. While the System Report will list the SATA port as SATA III capable it turns out Apple messed up the logic so the port won’t support drives faster than SATA II which is what you read about OWC Data Doubler. Here you need a fixed speed SATA II drive so Auto sense drives like Samsung 860 EVO won’t work correctly as it can’t correctly latch on the correct speed. The best way to think this is like a car, stick shift or auto. We need a stick shift drive so we tell it what we want, not one that tries to match the best speed. You talk about backing up, you really need an external drive for that! I don’t recommend swapping out the optical drive for a SSD as you loss the performance the SSD could be offering you. I would just replace my HDD drive with the SSD as being the smarter direction, and leaving the optical drive alone. And no, I don’t recommend swapping the drives around either! The HDD port has some added logic to help protect the HDD held within it, whereas the optical drive port doesn’t! If you want to have a dual drive setup replace both drives with SSD’s! Frankly, it won’t be any faster and with two drives your battery will run down faster, which is also a good reason to stick with a single drive.
