The 1TB SSD RAID MacBook Pro LIVES! (Super MacBook Pro Project 2013)

The Super MacBook Pro Project: Exploring Performance and Features

As I approached the new 2012 MacBook Pros, I was excited to dive into their capabilities and see how they would perform in various scenarios. The first thing I noticed was the SATA ports on the left side of the laptop. I wanted to scroll down to Serial ATA on this port to get all the important information about each of my two SATA ports. And as you can see here, the link speed is 6 GB/s on both traditional hard drive bay and the newly created optical drive bay that we used an adapter for. Some people suggested in older videos that you wouldn't get 6 GB connection on both of the two ports, but these new MacBook Pros actually deliver full link speed on both ports, making those previous suggestions wrong.

This is a significant advantage, especially when it comes to storage and data transfer speeds. With both SSDs installed, I was eager to see how they would perform in real-world scenarios. The first benchmark I ran was the disc speed test from Blackmagic Design, targeted at testing disc speed. This was perfect for testing the performance of these brand-new SSDs in a RAID configuration. After several tests and scenarios, I managed to achieve figures of 8404 megabytes per second and 9321 megabytes per second. These are astronomical figures for a laptop, and the performance is incredibly snappy.

The next benchmark I ran was Geekbench 2, which I had finally purchased the full version of, allowing me to run it in full Intel 64-bit mode. This took a couple of seconds, so I'll fast-forward through the actual benchmarking progress to get to the end and see the score figures. The system managed an impressive score of 13,466, which might not seem like much on its own but is actually quite significant when put into context with other popular scores from other systems in the Mac universe. According to the Geekbench chart on their website, the top score ever recorded is for the top-of-the-line Mac Pro with 12 cores. However, my system's score of 13,466 puts it right below the six-core Mac Pro desktop computer, and even above the top-spec 27-inch iMac with a faster clock speed at 3.4 GHz.

This is really an amazing figure for a laptop, especially when compared to consumer-grade systems that are typically stocked with less powerful processors. The fact that the MacBook Pros can score just as well as (or even better than) these desktop systems is a testament to Apple's commitment to delivering high-performance hardware in their laptops.

Moving on from the benchmarks, I noticed that the MacBench chart on their website shows some really interesting results. The top-of-the-line Mac Pro has a score of 14,111, which puts my system's score at just under this. However, it's worth noting that this is due to the Mac Pro having more cores and a faster clock speed than my MacBook Pros.

Next up was Cinebench R11.5, which runs two separate benchmarks: Open GL and CPU. The Open GL benchmark measures the performance of your graphics card, while the CPU benchmark tests the performance of your processor. For the Open GL score, I achieved 4.32 FPS, which is incredibly fast for a laptop. However, it's worth noting that this benchmark is usually used to test high-end gaming laptops or workstations.

The next benchmark was the CPU score, which rendered a really high-resolution image and is similar to what you might do in video editing software like Final Cut Pro. This benchmark gave me a score of 7.07 points, which beats out a 3.2 GHz Core i7-960 from Intel, even though it's a desktop chip rather than a laptop processor.

In conclusion, the Super MacBook Pro Project has been an exciting journey, and I'm thrilled with the performance and features that these laptops have to offer. Whether you're looking for high-speed storage, impressive benchmarks, or simply a powerful machine that can handle demanding tasks, the 2012 MacBook Pros are certainly worth considering.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's up guys this Lou from unbox therapy and welcome to the third video I believe in the super MacBook Pro project of course the hardware installation is now done so we're going to be talking about software and we're going to be doing some benchmarks before we get there I want to mention that I took the old hard drive that's no longer being used and put it into this simple USB 3 enclosure that's what I recommend you do if you do an upgrade like this these things are very very cheap and they're very useful because instead just you know throwing the hard drive out you can use it as a fast usb3 backup drive so I will link an enclosure down in the description so you can pick one up if you do an upgrade like this now the next thing to do is of course to install the OS because these drives are blank right now what you want to do is hold down command and R when booting up that will get you into the Apple recovery module now it does need to hook up to the web so you need an internet connection for this to operate as you can see the little Globe is spinning there after putting in your network credentials password Etc it will go ahead and download the necessary information so that you can boot into the recovery console which includes a reinstallation Button as well as dis utility and some other functions that will be useful to you if you are upgrading your system or if you just want to restore your system so from here the first thing we're going to do is access Disk Utility that's because we have two blank ssds in here the 4 80 gb Neutron GTX ssds from Corsair everything in this upgrade will be down in the description as well I'm trying to do that on each of these videos so you want to make sure that they're being read correctly and that you've installed them correctly as you can see I've got two of them here now I have already set up the raid for a total of 959.131 either of the two drives then hit the raid button and then from there you can just drag and drop the two hard drives or ssds in this case into this little window right here and then you can go ahead and hit create for the raid now in this particular case we have a striped raid which means that you get the full storage capacity of both of your drives with no redundancy so a little bit of a performance Improvement but no extra redundancy for backup if you want to have an active mirror of your system drive you can use Raid one instead and that will give you an always there backup but it won't give you any performance Improvement and of course you'll only get half the capacity because one drive is constantly running as a backup so the next thing to do is to reinstall the OS which I've already done here and I've gone ahead and set up the system with some benchmarking tools pre-installed so that I can show you guys how this system performs but before we get there I do want to mention that you should always check into your about this Mac in order to make sure that everything is being read correctly and also that the link speed on both of your ssds is being negotiated correctly so I'll give you more info on what that means right here so you want to go into about this Mac and then click on this system report from here you want to scroll down to Serial ATA on the leand side this will give you all the important information on each of your two SATA ports and as you can see here the link speed is 6 gbit on both the traditional hard drive bay as well as the newly created optical drive Bay that we used an adapter in order to access so some people suggested in older videos that you wouldn't get 6 GB connection on both of the two ports but on these new 2012 MacBook Pros you actually are getting full link speed on both ports so those people are actually wrong there's some really good information around the web about this and whether or not your model is compatible but in this particular case you get full speed no performance issues 6 gbits on both ports so we're getting an incredible performance boost here having both of these ssds installed speaking of performance here is the first Benchmark we're going to run this is the disc speed test from Blackmagic design targeted at testing disc speed so perfect for testing this brand new SSD raid the highest figures I came up with after a number of different tests and scenarios was 8404 megabytes per second right and 9321 mbes per second read these are astronomical figures for a laptop and the performance like the real world performance I mean is is just as good you can tell it's incredibly Snappy so the next Benchmark we want to do is geekbench 2 and I actually bought the full version finally so I can run it in full Intel 64-bit mode uh this takes a couple of seconds so I'm going to fast forward the actual benchmarking progress so that we can get to the end and get the score figures this system managed a 13,466 score that might not mean much to you on its own but once you put it in context and put it up against some other popular scores from other systems in the Mac Universe it actually comes up pretty damn impressive the geekbench score is like an overall score based on a number of different tests to tell you what your system is capable of so if you open up the Mac Benchmark chart on their website you can see here the top score ever recorded is for the top of the line Mac Pro with 12 cores you could pretty much assume that would be it but this is where things get interesting ours actually fits in pretty damn well below the six core Mac Pro desktop computer so even though this thing has four cores and is of course a laptop it scores pretty much as well as the six core Mac Pro and above the top spec 27 in iMac with a much faster clock speed at 3.4 GHz so that's the one with even the upgraded processor so this is really an amazing figure for a laptop and Beyond the stock systems that you can purchase is consumer stock systems with the exception of the Mac Pro so that includes the retina MacBook Pro top speec that you can order from them so the next Benchmark and the last Benchmark is cinebench release 11.5 this will run two separate benchmarks the first one is openg GL and the second one is CPU this will look at your CPU of course as well as your graphics processor so basically what you're you're seeing here is 3D graphics and it's being r Ed by the graphics card and then in the end it will spit out an FPS rating to tell you how quickly your system was able to deal with rendering those graphics and then you'll get a score based on that FPS so this is 4.32 FPS on the open GL score so the next thing we're going to run is the CPU score and this is a little bit different rather than be 3D Graphics rendering like moving Graphics this one just renders a really high resolution image like you might be doing in the Crea of Arts the way you might be using one of these MacBook Pros and then this will also give you a score but in a points figure 7.07 points and you can also check where this Stacks up against other systems so as you look down here you'll notice that it actually beats a 3.2 GHz core i7 960 from Intel which is also a four core chip but a desktop chip so once again really really nice numbers here but this would be essentially the same this CPU figure even if you didn't upgrade this system it's just a great CPU to begin with so anyway guys that wraps up the performance portion of the super MacBook Pro project I'm really excited about this particular system I'm happy with the way it's performing in the real world uh thanks for watching up until this point I'm going to put all the super MacBook Pro videos into one playlist if you want to go back and watch them I will link the playlist in the description uh thanks for watching if you guys enjoyed this project leave a thumbs up and I will catch you on the next video later nwhat's up guys this Lou from unbox therapy and welcome to the third video I believe in the super MacBook Pro project of course the hardware installation is now done so we're going to be talking about software and we're going to be doing some benchmarks before we get there I want to mention that I took the old hard drive that's no longer being used and put it into this simple USB 3 enclosure that's what I recommend you do if you do an upgrade like this these things are very very cheap and they're very useful because instead just you know throwing the hard drive out you can use it as a fast usb3 backup drive so I will link an enclosure down in the description so you can pick one up if you do an upgrade like this now the next thing to do is of course to install the OS because these drives are blank right now what you want to do is hold down command and R when booting up that will get you into the Apple recovery module now it does need to hook up to the web so you need an internet connection for this to operate as you can see the little Globe is spinning there after putting in your network credentials password Etc it will go ahead and download the necessary information so that you can boot into the recovery console which includes a reinstallation Button as well as dis utility and some other functions that will be useful to you if you are upgrading your system or if you just want to restore your system so from here the first thing we're going to do is access Disk Utility that's because we have two blank ssds in here the 4 80 gb Neutron GTX ssds from Corsair everything in this upgrade will be down in the description as well I'm trying to do that on each of these videos so you want to make sure that they're being read correctly and that you've installed them correctly as you can see I've got two of them here now I have already set up the raid for a total of 959.131 either of the two drives then hit the raid button and then from there you can just drag and drop the two hard drives or ssds in this case into this little window right here and then you can go ahead and hit create for the raid now in this particular case we have a striped raid which means that you get the full storage capacity of both of your drives with no redundancy so a little bit of a performance Improvement but no extra redundancy for backup if you want to have an active mirror of your system drive you can use Raid one instead and that will give you an always there backup but it won't give you any performance Improvement and of course you'll only get half the capacity because one drive is constantly running as a backup so the next thing to do is to reinstall the OS which I've already done here and I've gone ahead and set up the system with some benchmarking tools pre-installed so that I can show you guys how this system performs but before we get there I do want to mention that you should always check into your about this Mac in order to make sure that everything is being read correctly and also that the link speed on both of your ssds is being negotiated correctly so I'll give you more info on what that means right here so you want to go into about this Mac and then click on this system report from here you want to scroll down to Serial ATA on the leand side this will give you all the important information on each of your two SATA ports and as you can see here the link speed is 6 gbit on both the traditional hard drive bay as well as the newly created optical drive Bay that we used an adapter in order to access so some people suggested in older videos that you wouldn't get 6 GB connection on both of the two ports but on these new 2012 MacBook Pros you actually are getting full link speed on both ports so those people are actually wrong there's some really good information around the web about this and whether or not your model is compatible but in this particular case you get full speed no performance issues 6 gbits on both ports so we're getting an incredible performance boost here having both of these ssds installed speaking of performance here is the first Benchmark we're going to run this is the disc speed test from Blackmagic design targeted at testing disc speed so perfect for testing this brand new SSD raid the highest figures I came up with after a number of different tests and scenarios was 8404 megabytes per second right and 9321 mbes per second read these are astronomical figures for a laptop and the performance like the real world performance I mean is is just as good you can tell it's incredibly Snappy so the next Benchmark we want to do is geekbench 2 and I actually bought the full version finally so I can run it in full Intel 64-bit mode uh this takes a couple of seconds so I'm going to fast forward the actual benchmarking progress so that we can get to the end and get the score figures this system managed a 13,466 score that might not mean much to you on its own but once you put it in context and put it up against some other popular scores from other systems in the Mac Universe it actually comes up pretty damn impressive the geekbench score is like an overall score based on a number of different tests to tell you what your system is capable of so if you open up the Mac Benchmark chart on their website you can see here the top score ever recorded is for the top of the line Mac Pro with 12 cores you could pretty much assume that would be it but this is where things get interesting ours actually fits in pretty damn well below the six core Mac Pro desktop computer so even though this thing has four cores and is of course a laptop it scores pretty much as well as the six core Mac Pro and above the top spec 27 in iMac with a much faster clock speed at 3.4 GHz so that's the one with even the upgraded processor so this is really an amazing figure for a laptop and Beyond the stock systems that you can purchase is consumer stock systems with the exception of the Mac Pro so that includes the retina MacBook Pro top speec that you can order from them so the next Benchmark and the last Benchmark is cinebench release 11.5 this will run two separate benchmarks the first one is openg GL and the second one is CPU this will look at your CPU of course as well as your graphics processor so basically what you're you're seeing here is 3D graphics and it's being r Ed by the graphics card and then in the end it will spit out an FPS rating to tell you how quickly your system was able to deal with rendering those graphics and then you'll get a score based on that FPS so this is 4.32 FPS on the open GL score so the next thing we're going to run is the CPU score and this is a little bit different rather than be 3D Graphics rendering like moving Graphics this one just renders a really high resolution image like you might be doing in the Crea of Arts the way you might be using one of these MacBook Pros and then this will also give you a score but in a points figure 7.07 points and you can also check where this Stacks up against other systems so as you look down here you'll notice that it actually beats a 3.2 GHz core i7 960 from Intel which is also a four core chip but a desktop chip so once again really really nice numbers here but this would be essentially the same this CPU figure even if you didn't upgrade this system it's just a great CPU to begin with so anyway guys that wraps up the performance portion of the super MacBook Pro project I'm really excited about this particular system I'm happy with the way it's performing in the real world uh thanks for watching up until this point I'm going to put all the super MacBook Pro videos into one playlist if you want to go back and watch them I will link the playlist in the description uh thanks for watching if you guys enjoyed this project leave a thumbs up and I will catch you on the next video later n\n"