- Apple’s M5 MacBook Pro has a faster-than-expected SSD
- Apple said it was ‘up to 2 times’ faster than its M4 predecessor
- In fact, it’s more than twice as fast, at least in read speeds, and possibly more than three times as fast in some scenarios.
The M5 MacBook Pro actually has a really fast SSD and Apple has actually underestimated the drive performance in its laptop.
9to5Mac noted that while Apple was boasting that the new MacBook Pro offers “up to 2x faster SSD performance” compared to its M4-based predecessor, Max Tech on YouTube ran a full battery of tests, including storage, with a very surprising result for read speeds.
As for write speeds, the M5 MacBook Pro (with 512GB drive) hit 6,068 MB/s in Blackmagic’s drive speed test compared to 3,293 MB/s for the M4 model. So, that’s about 1.85 times faster and in line with Apple’s claim of “up to 2 times” (remember, “up to” means a ballpark figure for the best case scenario).
However, when it comes to read speeds, the M5’s SSD completely outperformed the M4’s drive, hitting 6,323 MB/s compared to 2,031 MB/s, making the new laptop more than 3 times faster, in fact, in this test.
Look
In short, Apple has underestimated the speed on offer here and the generational leap in these drives for read performance. During our testing at Future Labs, on the 1TB SSD of these MacBook Pro models, instead of the 512GB, we found similar results.
In fact, we recorded write speeds that were actually almost 2x faster with the M5 (about 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 beats the “up to 2x” expectation Apple gave us.
Analysis: what does this mean in practice?
Clearly, then, this SSD is a big improvement over the MacBook Pro M4 and quite an achievement for Apple. The boost in reading data from disk (rather than writing or copying it to disk) is quite phenomenal in terms of being up to 3 times faster in some circumstances (and certainly more than twice as fast, whichever way you look at it).
In practical terms, that much faster read speed will be very beneficial for the use case that Apple highlighted in its press release for the new MacBook Pro: “loading 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 is, of course, making big efforts to improve AI performance these days, and it’s not alone in that ambition).
It’s not just about AI, though, it’s about reading any large, heavy files that might be on your MacBook Pro’s drive, like a big, high-resolution video clip you might be preparing to edit, or perhaps some gigantic RAW photo files. Expect much snappier performance when it comes to intensive charging tasks like these.
There’s not much to write home about with the new MacBook Pro aside from the M5 update, but it’s somewhat surprising that Apple hasn’t raised its marketing voice a little more to trumpet this particular step up in performance levels.
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