A few days ago, Apple announced the new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros with the M2 Pro and M2 Max chips, as well as a new Mac mini with the M2 and M2 Pro processors, which come with higher performance, longer battery life, and some additional features. , such as support for WI-Fi 6E and the 6 GHz band. There are, however, some specifications that the company has not officially shared, and that fortunately we can find out thanks to some users who completely disassembled the product. It is precisely something that some users have done, who They have discovered that new computers have a slower SSD than their predecessors.
The YouTube channel Brandon Geekabit, for example, has verified that the Mac mini with an M2 processor and 256 GB of internal storage, they only have a NAND storage chip SSD, while the previous generation, with M1 chip, includes two chips with 128 GB of storage each. While the total amount of memory is exactly the same, the fact that the storage is spread across two NAND modules makes for much faster read and write speeds.
In fact, and as detailed in a test by MacRumors Through the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test, the new Mac mini with 256GB M2 storage delivers read and write speeds of around 1,500MB/s. They are, therefore, between 30% and 50% slower compared to their predecessor, they assure. The 512 GB version, on the other hand, offers exactly the same SSD speeds as the same variant of the Mac mini with the M1 chip, since its memory is also distributed among several NAND storage chips.
According to 9to5Mac, MacBook Pro with 512 GB storage M2 Pro also has a slower SSD than its predecessor, since the distribution of SSD memory is carried out in a smaller number of NAND chips. “Where the 512GB MacBook Pro M1 Pro had two visible NAND chips on the front of the motherboard and two on the back, the MacBook Pro M2 Pro only had one visible on the front of the motherboard,” he says. the aforementioned medium after disassembling the equipment.
The new MacBook Pro and Mac mini have a slower SSD, but should we worry?
Interestingly, it is not the first time that slower SSD speeds have been reported than the previous version in an Apple device. The 13-inch MacBook Air and MacBook Pro with an M2 chip and 256GB of storage also have the same problem. However, is it worrying?
In the past, Apple claimed to The Verge MacBook Pro and MacBook Air use higher-density NAND to deliver 256GB of storage on a single chip. “While the 256GB SSD benchmarks may show a difference compared to the previous generation, the performance of these M2-based systems for real-world activities is still faster.” In addition, and although there seems to be a significant difference in the read and write speeds of the SSDs, it is very unlikely that the user will notice a huge difference.