OT: Upgrading Ancient MB woes, SSD, SATA, Chipset

[slidey]

Caveat: I'm a bit rusty with hardware related jargon, so please correct me wherever necessary.

Aim: To replace my existing HDD with a SSD with SATA 3 connectivity on my Macbook 2,1 (13" white, mid-2007), and achieve full SATA 3 capabilities (6Gbps).

Problems: Macbook 2,1 only has SATA1 (1.5Gbps) connectivity supported, and I've been led to believe that SATA3 is not backward compatible with SATA1, at least not without a few hitches (as per Crucial, and I am eyeing their M4). Now the obvious thing to do is to upgrade the SATA connectors within the Mac, and that means upgrading the Intel chipset (ICH7-M).

Question: Has anyone here tried doing this, or does anyone know what would the cost I would incur in doing so, or can anyone point me to a better platform to post this question?

[efuentes]

I dont think that you can upgrade the sata chipset on your macbook, what kind of work are you doing that demands full sata 3 speeds?, if you need the speeds you might be better served using external storage and max your ram, I cant think of an application that wont max the cpu way before you saturate the sata channel

Saludos.

[AngryScientist]

i literally have no idea what anything in the OP is about, not one word. i opened this thread hoping to see a classic MB, mercedes benz. le sigh.

[markie]

Yeah, MB means a car to me, also.

So how much will your upgrade cost? I have had 5 Apple laptops and I find that after 5 years I am more than ready for an upgrade. Can your Mac even comfortably run the current OS?

[shovelhd]

You can't just "upgrade the chipset". It's part of the mainboard. External drives for that era are going to be USB2 or FW400, both are slow. Time to upgrade your old machine. You know you want four cores. You know you do.

[thegunner]

retina display mb. do it.

[slidey]

Lot of Matlab...right now when I run my simulations, most of my other apps are on a lockdown. RAM is already maxed out to the unofficial capacity of the Macbook 2,1 i.e. 3GB.

I dont think that you can upgrade the sata chipset on your macbook, what kind of work are you doing that demands full sata 3 speeds?, if you need the speeds you might be better served using external storage and max your ram, I cant think of an application that wont max the cpu way before you saturate the sata channel

Saludos.

[slidey]

I gifted one to my girl, so spending on another one's out :p

retina display mb. do it.

[slidey]

You're right. I was reminiscing my days of configuring clunker desktops and remember comparing chipsets on motherboard...so in essence I guess I'm stuck with the SATA speed that my mac came with, by virtue of the motherboard :cool:

You can't just "upgrade the chipset". It's part of the mainboard. External drives for that era are going to be USB2 or FW400, both are slow. Time to upgrade your old machine. You know you want four cores. You know you do.

[Wilkinson4]

Stuck but you can throw the m4 in there and it does make a nice difference. Just did it a few weeks ago and upgraded RAM. It's a new machine.

mIKE

[gordieax]

MB? We're not talking mountain bikes??

[Wilkinson4]

He could have been talking about the new electronic shift for Mountain Bikes:D Should have said Mobo:)

mIKE

[neiltron]

This man is talking about MOTHERBOARDS and COMPUTERS !!! Basically he wants to upgrade his laptop to have Super Record 11 but its only compatible with Centuar 10.

You cannot upgrade your ICH-7 chipset to something that supports SATA III.

Either throw in a cheaper 1.5Gbps SSD and stick it out

Or buy a used MBP that DOES support SATA III (and more RAM)

[rice rocket]

retina display mb. do it.

Disagree. The 13 rMBP is a half baked product. It doesn't have the power to drive the display at the resolution. It needs Haswell, which won't be here for another few months.

The 15 does better, but if you're coming from a non-retina MBP, you'll notice the stuttering on just about everything.

OP: just throw the SSD in there, it'll do fine. Yeah, it won't peak as high as if you did have 6 Gbps, but the beauty of the SSD is in IOPS, not in sequential read/write speeds.

[Climb01742]

Will you guys please speak human!;)

[thegunner]

Disagree. The 13 rMBP is a half baked product. It doesn't have the power to drive the display at the resolution. It needs Haswell, which won't be here for another few months.

The 15 does better, but if you're coming from a non-retina MBP, you'll notice the stuttering on just about everything.

OP: just throw the SSD in there, it'll do fine. Yeah, it won't peak as high as if you did have 6 Gbps, but the beauty of the SSD is in IOPS, not in sequential read/write speeds.

15" user -- to be fair, i do a fair amount of photo editing (and most of my dev work on a linux workstation) -- i don't think it stutters all that bad...

[oldpotatoe]

i literally have no idea what anything in the OP is about, not one word. i opened this thread hoping to see a classic MB, mercedes benz. le sigh.

I thought is was Mountain Bike...