Some early adopters of Apple’s early 2011 Thunderbolt-enabled MacBook Pros have been reporting performance issues that seem to be related to cable interference inside the MacBook Pro chassis. According to Other World Computing (OWC), however, yesterday’s firmware update should have fixed the issue.
The issue primarily affected the 17-inch models of the 2011 MacBook Pro, and some manufacturers (such as OWC) even developed shielding kits to remedy the problem. After applying yesterday’s firmware update, however, OWC found that their test systems showed significant performance increases.
According to OWC, this testing included multiple 2011 MacBook Pro models using OWC’s latest high-performance SSDs, and OWC is now confident that Apple has resolved the performance problems with 6Gb/s drives located in the main bay. OWC cautions, however, that the update does not improve performance of 6.0 Gb/s SATA drives used in the MacBook Pro’s optical bay.
