hard drivemacbook pro
I was following various guides for replacing the hard drive. However my mac does not seem to have the standard 2.5" SSD/SATA drive: see this screenshot:
The black rectangular sections are too small to be 'normal' 2.5hdd's as can be seen here when comparing to the SSD:
Does anyone know
The flash modules and controller of the SSD are blades (think naked SSD). They are not up to 3rd party configuration (at this time), but according to bmike, they are not soldered onto the main board and are actually discrete components.
However, there is no information as to what kind of proprietary (if any) configuration the blades come in, or whether they require an additional proprietary onboard controller (this may be likely given Apple's tendency to create speciality hardware for their line-up). So it most likely isn't the case that one could just crack open an existing SSD and use the blades within. A manufacturer would have to specifically design a unit for the new notebook. This isn't unlikely, but price will be the determining factor as it will be a speciality component.
It is also not clear at this time if Apple will make the components upgradeable, which is also a distinct possibility given how quickly SSDs are saturating the market place.
At best, it's a tentative "maybe."
You can read more about the new machine here: http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/design/
I believe the issue to be that the controller is still SATA III for the optical bay, yet the connector is a SATA II type, as is the cable. So if you try and place a SATA III enabled drive in the optical bay, it will try and negotiate at SATA III speed (6G). This creates an issue as the cable is not setup for this and the crosstalk, and very low SNR at that speed causes many errors. I got my Seagate Momentus SSHD disk drive working somewhat in the optical bay by wrapping it and the short cable in tin foil, making it a good ground to the chassis, but it still had loads of errors on it. I ended up putting a SATA II disk in which works. My Macbook is a 2012 13in with an 2.9GHz i7 in it. This shows both connectors as 7 series Intel Chipset, both of them are supported for 6G, yet the optical drive is negotiated as 3G (SATA II). My Samsung SSD in the HDD bay, is negotiated as the full 6G.
Have a check in system profiler to see what supported speeds and negotiated speeds you are seeing for your controllers. There seems to be a lot of conflicting information about what model supports what, but it makes sense that the controllers are the same type on the main board for the particular chipset being used. The connectors are different though.
I was hoping there would be a hard disk that you can force SATA II on, or some way of enforcing the controller to only ever negotiate up to 3G, but thus far haven't had any luck :-(
Hope that helps demystify the core issue at stake here somewhat.
Best Answer
All the black compartments are the Li- Ion Polymer batteries which power your MacBook Pro.
You won't be able to swap a 2.5'' drive in your Macbook because the Mid 2012 Retina models use a flash memory module.
Here you can see a guide to upgrading the SSD.