What causes my MBP to only get half of my SSD's max speeds?

[JLMORIART]

Howdy, I have a mid 2010 13 inch Macbook Pro 7,1 running 10.10.5 and I have replaced the stock 5400 rpm drive with a Mushkin Enhanced Chronos 480GB SSD:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820226372

I got Trim Enabler running and did all of the optimization/upkeep I've seen recommended online with a little googling (like disabling the sleep image, doing the noatime thing, and setting up RAM disks for temporary files).

Even still, while the page above lists the drives max speeds as 540 MB/s read and 460 MB/s write, I'm only getting 200MB/s read and write. (I also know not to run too many benchmarks since it's not good for the health of the drive. That's what I've gotten most recently though.)

While still way better than what was probably less than 50MBps on the HDD, I'm curious as to why I'm only getting less than half the max of the SSD. Is it bottlenecked by my old processor, or some other hardware? (That seems unlikely but who knows.) Or is there something I can do about it?

The tease of potentially halving my boot time and load times for applications (especially bigger ones like sibelius and garageband) is almost torture

Thanks for any help!
-J

 

[Erdbeertorte]

That's totally normal. Because the SSD is SATA-III and you have only SATA-II with 3 Gigabits/s instead of 6.

Also no SATA-SSD is able to reach the maximum speed of the SATA controller.

 

[\-V-/]

Like Erd said, your computer is the limiting factor. It can't take full advantage of the SSD's speed.

 

[JLMORIART]

That's totally normal. Because the SSD is SATA-III and you have only SATA-II with 3 Gigabits/s instead of 6.

View attachment 608162

Also no SATA-SSD is able to reach the maximum speed of the SATA controller.

Thanks very much for the info. It's a bummer that it's the interface that's getting in the way, but I guess when this computer eventually gives out then the drive will still have more to give in another machine!

 

[Erdbeertorte]

Thanks very much for the info. It's a bummer that it's the interface that's getting in the way, but I guess when this computer eventually gives out then the drive will still have more to give in another machine!

Yes it's bad luck with the timing of purchase. The Mid-2010 was the last one with SATA-II and just a Display Port, the Early 2011 already got SATA-III and Thunderbolt.

Anyway it's very much faster than every HDD even on SATA-III.

But because of the Core 2 Duo CPU in your 13" you can upgrade the RAM up to 16GB (2x8GB), the Mid-2010 15" and 17" are only able to handle 8GB.

 

[T5BRICK]

Just gauging by the "feel" of the computer, upgrading from 50MB/s to 200MB/s is a huge improvement, while there really isn't a noticeable difference during normal usage going from 200MB/s to 500MB/s (or even 1200MB/s, for that matter).

Even if you're being limited by the interface, it's still a great upgrade.

 

[Erdbeertorte]

And it's also not all about data transfer rates. Another big advantage of an SSD is the very much lower data access time.