- The MacBook Pro M5’s SSD is even faster than expected
- Apple announces “up to twice the performance” of the M4
- In fact, read speeds far exceed this value and, depending on the case, can triple performance.
The M5 MacBook Pro has an incredibly fast SSD, the capabilities of which Apple apparently underestimated in its official announcement.
page 9to5Mac He noted that despite Apple’s promise of an SSD “up to twice as fast” as the M4 model, YouTube channel Max Tech ran a series of tests, particularly on the storage front, with particularly surprising results on the read side.
For writing, the MacBook Pro M5 (512GB) achieved 6,068 MB/s in the Blackmagic Disk Speed test, compared to 3,293 MB/s for the M4 model. This equates to around 1.85 times earnings and matches Apple’s promise (“until” is the best case scenario).
But when reading, the M5’s SSD literally crushes the M4’s, with a score of 6,323 MB/s compared to 2,031 MB/s. This means that the new model is more than three times faster in this test.
Comparison of MacBook Pro ULTRA M4 and M5: Holy smokes, Apple! – YouTube
In conclusion, we can say that Apple has minimized the performance jump offered here, especially when reading. Testing at Future Labs (on the 1TB versions of these MacBook Pros instead of the 512GB models) produced similar results.
Write speeds were found to be almost twice as fast (about 1.95 times faster for the M5), while read speeds showed an increase of about 2.3 times. Performance that continues to exceed Apple’s expectations.
What exactly is changing?
This SSD represents a significant step forward compared to the MacBook Pro M4 and is a major achievement for Apple. The improvement in read performance (that is, extracting data from disk instead of copying it) is remarkable: up to three times faster in some contexts (and at least more than twice as fast in any case).
In practice, this read speed will be very useful in one of the use cases that Apple highlighted when the MacBook Pro was announced: loading artificial intelligence models locally. This means that using an AI model directly in the machine will work much better on the M5 MacBook Pro, an area where Apple, like its competitors, is investing more and more.
But this advantage is not just about artificial intelligence. Any task that requires the playback of large files, such as high definition videos for editing or large RAW photo files, will benefit from this increased speed. Intensive charging processes are significantly accelerated.
Apart from the M5 chip, the new MacBook Pro doesn’t have many new features. However, it is surprising that Apple does not emphasize this remarkable improvement in SSD performance more in its communication.
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