[JamieG]

Sorry in advance, i'm not that good with technical jargon.

I wanted to upgrade the hard drive of my macbook. It is the unibody aluminium one, but not a macbook pro. Here is the wiki page with it on, if you scroll down a bit.

I looked on a few forums about macs and they said any SATA 2.5" hard drive would do. So i went to Amazon and bought this one. Then i noticed it said SATA II. I have no idea what this means or if i have made a mistake. Does anyone know if it will still work? If not it will be straight back to Amazon.

Thanks very much for any help. Waddage will be awarded regardless of wether you have good or bad news to tell me. 

[slackline]

Not clear from the product specification on Wikipedia what the motherboard is and whether its SATA I/II/III.

How old is it?

SATA II started increasing in prevalence last year..

One option might be to open the MacBook up and look at the HD thats in there and see if its labelled as SATA II or not.  If it is then you're good to go.

A quick but of  suggests that the MacBook is 1.5Gb/s (i.e. SATA I) but that you might be able to get it to work regardless by using a couple of jumper pins.

You could probably get some detailed information on the hardware thats in there by doing the following (because under all the bells and whistles of OSX, Macs these days are essentially running *NIX as they are derived from BSD).

Fire up a terminal and use either the command 'lspci -vv' or 'lshw' to get detailed output on the hardware components in your computer (although its possible that one or neither of the commands are installed by default, lshw in particular, but lspci should be installed).

[JamieG]

Cheers slack---line for your prompt response. Wad point dished out. I had done quite a bit (read: a lot) of googling before coming on here. But eventually i thought i would do better asking the computer literate on ukb, instead of trawling through pages and pages of forum babble on the mac sites.

Also after a bit more web sleuthing i think you can use either sata 1 or sata 2 or at least that is what this suggests. Although apparently some times macs can be a bit picky about the hard drive you plug in, even if all the specs are ok. I guess i'll wait and see.

Cheers Jamie

[slackline]

I think you should be fine, because even if the motherboard doesn't support SATA II you can limit the rate of data transfer on the drive to that of SATA I by putting jumpers on the pins (at least thats my take on the postings in the thread I linked).

In both of the HowTo photoguides from the discussion you just linked it looks pretty simple to open up the casing and be able to look at and see the HD that is already in place, they'll have writing on them to indicate what they are, look for SATA I/II and or specifications of the drives data transfer capabilities (whether its SATA I which is 1.5Gb/s or SATA II which is 3.0Gb/s).

[benpritch]

could just go apple/about this mac/ then press the more info button in the window that appears then look for your hard drive in the hardware section?

[slackline]

could just go apple/about this mac/ then press the more info button in the window that appears then look for your hard drive in the hardware section?

Probably easier than my suggestion (I've not used a Mac since about 1990) but may not be as detailed as lspci -vv (which is very verbose).

[Johnny Brown]

Just tried that on mine, and it isn't very clear...

or specifications of the drives data transfer capabilities (whether its SATA I which is 1.5Gb/s or SATA II which is 3.0Gb/s)

Link Speed:   3 Gigabit
  Negotiated Link Speed:   1.5 Gigabit

Which I'm guessing means a SATA I drive on a SATA II port? That's on a 6 month-old 13" pro if its any use...

[slackline]

Link Speed:   3 Gigabit
  Negotiated Link Speed:   1.5 Gigabit

Which I'm guessing means a SATA I drive on a SATA II port? That's on a 6 month-old 13" pro if its any use...

Based on that information that would be my conclusion too.

Thats a bit shit though if the motherboard supports SATA II and they're flogging them with SATA I drives in (especially given the rep for getting hardware spot on that Apple have).

[Jim]

I always thought that sata2 was backwards compatible?
just stick it in there and hope it works

[Johnny Brown]

Thats a bit shit though if the motherboard supports SATA II and they're flogging them with SATA I drives in

From my limited knowledge I thought the ports would be unlikely to be a limiting factor on speed, with drives having max speeds of 60MPS or so? I thought the idea of faster port would running a number of drives eg in a RAID array?

[mr__j5]

I always thought that sata2 was backwards compatible?
just stick it in there and hope it works

 

SATA drives just run at the lowest common speed of the drive and controller as far as I understand.

However, given that SATA I is still 1.5Gb/s or 150MB/s there won't be many times when you hit this speed limit if you are using a standard HDD. Saying that, it's years since I've seen a SATA I drive for sale when looking at buying HDD's.

[JamieG]

I always thought that sata2 was backwards compatible?
just stick it in there and hope it works

Haha, you seem to have hit my level of computer literacy straight on the head.

Thanks everyone for the help. I'm not too worried about speeds etc, i just don't fancy running out of space.