- Apple’s MacBook Pro M5 has a faster-than-expected SSD
- Apple said it was ‘up to 2x’ faster than its M4 predecessor
- In fact, it’s well over twice as fast, at least for read speeds, and possibly more like 3x as fast in some scenarios
The MacBook Pro M5 really has a seriously fast SSD, and in fact, Apple has understated the performance of the drive in its laptop.
9to5Mac noted that while Apple boasted that the new MacBook Pro offers “up to 2x faster SSD performance” compared to its M4-based predecessor, Max Tech on YouTube ran a whole battery of tests, including storage, with a very surprising result for read speeds.
When it came to write speeds, the MacBook Pro M5 (with 512GB drive) achieved 6,068 MB/s in the Blackmagic disk speed test, compared to 3,293 MB/s for the M4 model. So that’s about 1.85x faster and in line with Apple’s “up to 2x” claim (remember, “up to” means a ballpark at best).
But for read speeds, the SSD in the M5 absolutely blew away the drive in the M4, hitting 6,323 MB/s compared to 2,031 MB/S – so the new laptop is actually over 3x faster in this test.
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In short, Apple has underestimated the speed on offer here and the generation jump in these drives for read performance. During our testing at Future Labs – on 1TB SSDs from these MacBook Pro models, as opposed to 512GB – we found similar results.
In fact, we recorded write speeds that were actually closer to 2x faster with the M5 (around 1.95x) compared to the M4 model, but read speeds were more like 2.3x faster for the M5 – which is still extremely impressive, exceeding the “up to 2x” expectations from Apple.
Analysis: what does it mean in practice?
Clearly, this SSD is a big upgrade over the MacBook Pro M4 and quite an achievement for Apple. The boost when reading data from the drive (as opposed to writing – copying data to the drive) is quite phenomenal, being up to 3x faster in some circumstances (and certainly well over twice as fast, whichever way you slice it).
In practical terms, the much faster read speed will be very beneficial for the use case that Apple highlighted in its press release for the new MacBook Pro – namely “loading a local LLM faster”. This means that the use of an AI model on the device will be much more responsive on the MacBook Pro M5 (and of course Apple is very keen to increase AI performance these days – and it is not alone in that ambition).
This isn’t just about AI though, it’s about reading any big, chunky file that might be on your MacBook Pro’s drive, like a big high-resolution video clip you might be settling down to edit, or maybe some giant RAW photo files. Expect much better performance when it comes to intensive loading tasks like these.
There’s not much to shout about with the new MacBook Pro, outside of the M5 upgrade, but it’s somewhat surprising that Apple didn’t raise its marketing voice a bit louder to trumpet this particular advance in performance levels.
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