According to 9to5Mac, the base version of the 14-inch MacBook Pro with the M2 chip has a slower SSD than its predecessor. In the BlackMagic test, the 512 GB SSD in Apple’s latest model showed read speeds of around 2970 MB/s and write speeds of around 3150 MB/s. In comparison, the previous MacBook Pro based on the M1 chip achieved 4900 MB/s read and 3950 MB/s write for a drive of the same capacity. So the base 2023 model delivers about 39% slower read speeds and 20% slower write speeds than the 2021 model.
The reason for this situation is most likely the NAND memory chips used. According to 9to5Mac, the previous generation 512GB MacBook Pro had 4 memory chips, while the M2 version had only 2 memory chips. The capacity of the drive remained the same, but the performance decreased, as the parallelization of read and write operations worsened.
The use of fewer NAND memory chips in new generation laptops is not new to Apple. The new MacBook Air models with the M2 chip and 256GB storage and the 13-inch MacBook Pro had slower memory than the M1 processor versions. For those versions that use only one memory chip, the situation is even worse. But these are relatively entry-level laptops. The 14-inch MacBook Pro is a $2,000 computer aimed at creative professionals and developers. This is not a segment where you can expect optimizations that sacrifice performance.
At the same time, MacBook Pro models with more storage capacity do not suffer from the performance degradation of the drive. Test results show that the 14-inch MacBook Pro (M2 Pro + 2TB and M2 Max + 1TB) delivers the same or better storage performance as previous generation models. So, the version with the M2 Pro chip and a 2TB SSD provides a read speed of 5293 MB / s and a write speed of 6168 MB / s, significantly outperforming the model with a 512 GB drive.
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It is noted that despite the reduction in drive performance in the base version of the MacBook Pro with a 512 GB SSD, it still has enough bandwidth to play 12K ProRes 422 HQ video at 60 frames per second.
Source: The Verge
