The late-2011 MacBook Pro supports SATA III-but Apple included only a SATA II hard drive (HDD), which may have been for cost reasons, but also should have been a clue.ĭrive controllers in a computer are backwards compatible, allowing a SATA III controller to work with a SATA II drive, while the reverse isn’t always the case. Each successive standard is backwards compatible with the previous one and they all use the same physical connector type. SATA I offered a maximum 1.5 gigabits per second (150 megabytes per second) transfer rates II doubled to 3Gbps (300MBps) and III doubled again to 6Gbps (600MBps). (Apple has replaced this with a PCIe bus in modern MacBook Pros.) Until relatively recently and for many years, nearly all desktop and laptop computers used the Serial ATA (SATA) standard in version I, II, or III as the protocol for moving data to and from the computer to a disk drive. (If you can find a 4TB laptop drive that’s no higher than 9.5mm, you’re good.)īut I did find a number of people discussing an issue between 20 related to this and similar models: a drive-interface standard mismatch, despite seeming compatibility.

I researched again to make sure there wasn’t a known controller flaw or limitation, and there wasn’t. I tweeted about this frustration on my latest failure, and my friend Alanna asked: are you sure this laptop model can accept a 1TB drive? I was sure! Or so I thought.

Macbook pro 2012 internal hard drive