- Apple’s MacBook Pro M5 has a faster SSD than expected
- Apple said it was “up to 2x” faster than its M4 predecessor
- In fact, it’s well over twice as fast, at least for reading speeds, and perhaps over 3x as fast in some scenarios.
The MacBook Pro M5 really has a very fast SSD, and in fact, Apple underestimated the performance of its laptop’s drive.
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 host of tests, including storage, with a very surprising result for read speeds.
As for write speeds, the M5 MacBook Pro (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 claim of “up to 2x” (remember, “up to” means a ballpark figure for the best case scenario).
However, for read speeds, the M5’s SSD completely blew the M4’s drive out of the water, hitting 6,323 MB/s versus 2,031 MB/s – so the new laptop is actually over 3x faster in this test.
Look on it
In short, Apple underestimated the speed on offer here and the generational leap these drives have in read performance. In our testing at Future Labs – on the 1TB SSDs in these MacBook Pro models, instead of 512GB – we found similar results.
Indeed, 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 and exceeds the “up to 2x” expectations Apple gave us.
Analysis: what does this mean in practice?
So it’s clear that this SSD is a major upgrade over the M4 MacBook Pro and a real success for Apple. The improvement in reading data from disk (as opposed to writing – copying data to disk) is quite phenomenal, being up to 3x faster in some circumstances (and certainly well over twice as fast whichever way you decide it).
Concretely, this much faster reading speed will be very beneficial for the use case highlighted by Apple in its press release for the new MacBook Pro, namely “load a local LLM faster”. This means that using an on-device AI model will be much more responsive on the M5 MacBook Pro (and Apple, of course, is working to improve AI performance these days – and it’s not alone in this ambition).
It’s not just AI, but reading any large file that might be on your MacBook Pro’s drive, like a big, high-resolution video clip that you might sit down to edit, or gargantuan RAW photo files, perhaps. 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, aside from the M5 upgrade, but it’s somewhat surprising that Apple hasn’t raised its marketing voice a little louder to trumpet this particular step up in performance levels.
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