Apple Upgrades MacBook Pros At Production Level To Use SATA3 In Optical Drives

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Early adopters of the MacBook Pro, you’re likely to be a bit distressed by what you’re about to hear, but if you put off buying a MacBook Pro for a while, prepare to have your decision royally justified. Seems that Apple’s been quietly tweaking its MacBook Pro lineup to include a small but very substantial change in its laptop line–they’ve been switching from SATA2 to SATA3 in the optical bays.

Of course, this news does come with a few caveats. Those hoping that this will be the opportunity they’ve waited for to slap in a SATA3 solid state drive in their optical bay instead of an optical drive will be stymied here, as there are some compatibility problems that will, reportedly, require one of three possible fixes: an EFI update, the release of Snow Leopard 10.6.8 (which is at last report still stuck deep in beta testing), or possibly even another hardware tweak.

If you want to check and see if your MacBook Pro is one of the reportedly many lucky new ones that pack the extra speed in the optical bay, it’s actually fairly easy to find out. All you’ll need to do is go to the Apple System Profiler app and check the Hardware tab, then look at the Serial-ATA entry. If you see six gigabit on both bays, congratulations, you’re packing SATA3.

Still though, even if you can’t get a SATA3 drive in there, you may still be able to get other drives in there, and that would probably be a welcome boost for most users. And there are other possibilities as well.

And what about you folks? Do you have one of the juiced-up new MacBook Pros? If so, what are you thinking about doing with that optical bay, leaving it as an optical drive or slapping something else in there to try and take advantage of the extra speed? The comments section is waiting, so head on down and tell us what you’ve got in mind with your new MacBook Pro!