When I upgraded my MacBook Pro to a superfast SSD drive last week, I knew I was taking a little bit of a gamble. You see, it had just come out that the new MacBook Pros drives were capped at 1.5 Gbps instead of the 3Gbps speed found in the prior generation. This wasn’t an issue for anyone using a spinning drive, but it did mean that a SATA II drive like the OCZ Summit series driver I installed would be underutilized. (The drive has read speeds of up to 220 MB per second and up to 200 MB per second write speeds.) I install the drive anyhow for two reasons. First even if the speed remained capped at 1.5Gbps I was going to have a far faster MacBook than ever before and no moving parts. Second, in my two years as a Mac user I have seen Apple do some things that were upsetting or disappointing but it made no sense to me that they would improve so much about the MacBook Pros and then go backwards here. I assume they fixed the problem.

They have.

Apple just issued an EFI firmware update that allows drivers to use transfer rates greater than 1.5 GB per second. They do, however, go out of their way to note that they have not “qualified or offered these drives for Mac notebooks and therefore their use is unsupported”.

There you have it, I’m using an unsupported drive in my MacBook Pro… And loving it.