Ah, thank you. It says 3/Gigabit, which is SATA 2. Is there a way to replace the SATA 2 equipment with SATA 3 equipment? I know I can get a new PCIe card for external storage that will support SATA 3 but I would like it for internal storage if possible. Is it possible to switch out SATA 2 for SATA 3? What is it a card or something?
The chip in question is the Intel ICH10, which as
Vylen mentioned, is soldered to the board.
There's only one internal card ATM (it is bootable), but it's not cheap ($400USD), is the
ATTO H608. It doesn't use standard SATA ends to the card either, so you'd also need
fan-out cables (2x, as each runs 4x disks). Tad steep for just running SSD's to try and take advantage of the 6.0Gb/s interface.
You'd be fine with SATA 2 for most, if not everything anyway with current 6.0Gb/s disks. They're topping out at ~ 270MB/s or so for sequential reads, and random access is much slower than that (BTW, the 285MB/s figure from OWC isn't real world). Now as it happens, SATA 2 tops out at ~275MB/s.
So you'd be better off just using the ICH for now (cheaper, and feasible ATM), and wait for a cheaper internal card to release. The likely issue with this alternative however, is that there's a very high likelihood that they won't be bootable (driver support only, such as the current 6.0Gb/s eSATA cards are).
> About This Mac > More Info > Hardware > Serial ATA > Link Speed.