Recently the dudes at Barefeats did some testing with the 2011 Apple harvest. Most specifically with the Macbook Pro’s based on the new Sandy bridge chipset and Intel’s I5/I7 CPUs. What they did was order a default  Macbook Pro with as little options as possible and replace the hard drive / SSD first with default Apple drives and later on with 3th party “not blessed by Steve Jobs” storage.

Condensed report:

Different drives, ranging from hard drives to SSD were tested with very impressive results. First of all you need to know that the new Sandy bridge based notebooks support the 6GBPS SATA III interface. Thus can benefit from this incredible speed gain by default. Unfortunately Apple is still sticking to the 3GPPS SATA II generation of hard drives/SSDs.

Description: Read per sec (Small file/Large file)      Write per sec (Small file/Large file)

APPLE Toshiba 750G 5400 RPM:                                                          16mb / 104mb                                19mb / 108mb
APPLE Western Digital Black 500G 7200 RPM:                                21mb / 102mb                                47mb / 102mb
APPLE SSD 256G:                                                                                   104mb / 212mb                               114mb / 206mb
OCZ Vertex III (SandForce SF2200 chipset) :                                 203mb / 506mb                             234mb / 464mb

The numbers really do the talking here, at a whopping 506mb/sec read speed and 464mb/sec write speed for large files (think of Final Cut projects), the OCZ Vertex III really is worth taking the bottom plate off your new machine and do some modding. Knowing the Vertex III is currently priced similar or cheaper than Apple’s default SSD option, it sure is interesting to get double the performance from a 3th party manufacturer’s products.