A fast look contained in the base-level M2 Professional MacBook Professional revealed one thing I hadn’t anticipated to see – or, moderately, that one thing I HAD anticipated to see was lacking. Like the bottom degree M2 MacBook Air, the bottom degree of the most recent 14″ MacBook Professional appears to characteristic fewer NAND chips – at a better capability – than the final era. This leads to SSD learn and write efficiency that’s dramatically decrease than the earlier era.
The bottom mannequin M1 and M2 MacBook Air present simply 256GB of storage. With the M1 MacBook Air, that storage was break up between two 128GB Kioxia NAND chips. As Apple moved to the M2, they switched to newer NAND chips that offered 256GB of storage per chip. This meant that the bottom mannequin M2 MacBook Air with simply 256GB of storage had just one NAND chip, and the performance of the SSD was impacted as a result.
Just like the M1 Air, the bottom 512GB M1 Professional had its storage break up between 4 128GB NAND chips. In iFixit’s teardown, they present two 128GB NAND chips on one aspect of the board, and an extra two 128GB NAND chips on the opposite aspect. Just like the M2 Air earlier than it, the M2 MacBook Professional appears to have switched to bigger NAND chips, with the bottom mannequin seeing slower SSD efficiency consequently.
With the notable decrease SSD efficiency in my M2 Pro MacBook Pro, I needed to have a look inside to substantiate why. Positive sufficient, the place the 512GB M1 Professional MacBook Professional had two NAND chips seen on the entrance of the motherboard and one other two on the again, the M2 Professional MacBook Professional had just one seen on the entrance of the board. There may be probably a second NAND chip instantly apposing this, because the M1 had.
Whereas the upper storage density of NAND chips is good, it’s all the time disappointing when a product will get worse between generations. Fortunately, most individuals gained’t see the impression of this in on a regular basis use. The learn and write speeds on the drive are nonetheless extraordinarily quick, so the distinction will probably solely be noticeable in excessive edge-cases.
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