SSD performance of 13-inch MacBook Pro With M2 is slower than last-gen

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At this month’s WWDC 2022 developer conference, Apple released a new generation of M2 chips. The 13-inch MacBook Pro with M2 and the new MacBook Air, the entry-level model with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, are now on sale.

According to MacRumors, several bloggers have tested the 13-inch MacBook Pro With M2 and found that the performance of its 256GB solid-state drive is much worse than that of the M1 version.
13-inch MacBook Pro
In the test, the 8GB unified memory of the MacBook Pro is used by various processes, and the system will use the SSD as virtual memory, which will reduce the overall system performance. Through the Blackmagic Disk Speed ​​Test, it was found that the read speed of the M2 version of the SSD is 1446 MB/s, which is only half of the 2900 MB/s of the M1 version, and the write speed is 1463 MB/s, which is also down by about 34% compared to the 2215 MB/s of the M1 version.
Disk Speed Test app numbers shared by Max Yuryev of Max Tech:

  • 13-inch MacBook Pro (M1/256GB) Read Speed: 2,900
  • 13-inch MacBook Pro (M2/256GB) Read Speed: 1,446
  • 13-inch MacBook Pro (M1/256GB) Write Speed: 2,215
  • 13-inch MacBook Pro (M2/256GB) Write Speed: 1,463
A blogger disassembled the M2 version of the 13-inch MacBook Pro entry model and found that the 256GB solid-state drive has only one NAND flash memory chip, while the M1 version has two NAND flash memory chips. This difference can explain why the disk speed of the new product has dropped. Of course, if consumers choose the 512GB SSD model, the disk speed is similar to the M1 version because it uses two NAND flash memory chips, but this requires a higher cost.

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