2018 MacBook Pro Has Fastest SSD Ever | Hacker News Reader

2018 MacBook Pro Has Fastest SSD Ever

laptopmag.com

25 pointslleddell31 comments

> 2018 MacBook Pro Has Fastest SSD Ever

This title is misleading. I have a faster SSD in my year-old home desktop. They say in the article that they mean the fastest SSD they've ever seen in a production laptop.

No you don’t, that speed is for an OS level copy not the advertised max seq write speed.

I have the 960 pro in raid and I don’t get more than 2000-2200 MB/s when copying a files of that size on an actual file system.

Based on the copy speed vs advertised speed I would put the max seq write speed of that drive at least in the 3000 MB/s range this is at least as fast as the 970 evo in its largest capacity if not faster since Apple tends to use Sammy SSDs I’m betting that this is a newer version of the PM981 which might some day be released as the 980 evo or even pro.

My XPS 15 shipped with a PM981 (1TB) and while it is fast it isn't as fast as the speeds in the article. However I think this is more down to Apple "cheating" at the file system level with delayed write and snapshots or whatever other tricks they are using.

Also the PM981 is the same tech as used in the 970 EVO. Samsung have also had the SM line previous which was the same tech as used in the PRO line but there doesn't seem to be an SM981 so maybe they are no longer doing OEM MLC?

It’s not the PM981 but it quite possibly be a newer version of it, the WD Black reaches speeds of 2800 MB/s in its 1TB version so it’s not unreasonable that a Sammy refresh of the 981/970 will be at least as fast as the newer WDs.

And while Apple can cheat at least on the mid 2015 15” MBP with a 1TB NVME I’m not getting any speeds that aren’t in line with my drive this is on a Mojave preview with APFS.

I will have to test on my 2018 MBP when it arrives in a couple of weeks. Will be interesting to see side-by-side against the PM981.

You can't infer anything from the copy speed. The article mentions that it is using the new apple file system apfs. Which includes a clone feature that upon copying a file, a reference to that file is created. The file system then only actually stores changes made to individual copies. So I'm surprised it actually took 2 seconds.

The disk benchmark shouldn’t copy just write and it had managed to get a bit higher speeds, I have and older version of these drives which isn’t that much slower and I can get simmilar speeds in Windows.

Running Black Magic Disk Mark in my mid 2015 MBP with an NVME SSD with Mojave preview and APFS does produces valid results if this would be just a soft link copy I would get the same speeds even with a slower NVME.

Really? Faster than 2,519MB/s? I thought they were achieving this by ganging together 2 drives via their proprietary T2 chip.

They admit in the article that a lot of this performance could be an illusion caused by the APFS instant cloning feature, which essentially just creates a new directory listing pointing to the existing file when you copy a file to the same volume. A separate copy of the data is only made when you make a change to one of the files.

It also appears that it doesn't copy the whole file upon changing one of the files. It only stores the changed portion. I assume this is block level. Pretty cool. But yes, SSD speed has very little to do with copy speed in this case.

I wonder if this could be used to infer information that users may not intend. For example, perhaps copying a file and fraudulently altering something in it at a specific time could be used as evidence in a trial.

The speed seems to be accurate for a high capacity PM981 or newer especially in raid Apple is just using bonker fast SSDs.

Isn’t this from the custom SSD controller they’ve been iterating over for years? [0] A variation of it even made its way into the iPhone [1]. Of course there are likely more hardware factors, such as binning.

0: http://www.iphonehacks.com/2015/04/apple-custom-ssd-controll...

1: https://bgr.com/2015/09/29/iphone-6s-macbook-ssd-storage-con...

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12167/the-microsoft-surface-b... this seems to disagree.

So Copy on Write (essentially NOPs) are now being counted towards disk performance tests?

Also, apple is using the new file system that makes things like copying files more efficient (not sure how exactly), but sounds like the test is going to make the mac look awesome even though many people who pay extra for a 1 TB samsung EVO 960+ SSD are going to be matching apple's performance..

For example, my 2012 MBP uses a Samsung EVO 960 SSD and yes its super fast.. and I didn't have to pay $4000 for the computer..

Here's an explanation of what APFS is doing to make file copying to the same volume almost instantaneous:

http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/2016/06/19/apfs-part3/

The Mac App Store reviews on the disk speed test tool they are using are abysmal, so I wonder if it's truly testing the disk performance or being fooled by the tricks that APFS is doing.

A new 13" with 16 GB of memory, 256 GB SSD, and 2.3GHz quad‑core 8th‑generation i5 is $2,000. Half your quoted $4,000.

In my case an i5 with only 256GB SSD and 13" is not so great.. and I would prefer to replace my 15" MBP from 2012 with a 1TB SSD and 16GB ram and an i7 with also a 15" MBP with similar class stuff.. I guess maybe if I got used to using an external monitor always then the 13" would be nice, and I would just use an external mouse and keyboard -- but then its not clear why I'm buying the mac since the display and trackpad are typically some of the selling points. Keyboard used to be, but not so much anymore..

Something I noticed that is interesting is the 13" models run 2133MHz LPDDR3 while the 15" models run 2400MHz DDR4. Both are 8th generation Intel's. Does that mean they run different chipsets?

This was a necessary tradeoff in order to offer 32GB RAM in the 15" machines. After years of delays, Intel's chipsets still do not support LPDDR4. It's possible that it's still the same chipset on both machines, though.

So the 2400MHz DDR4 is obviously faster because of the increased bus speed right? LP just mean low power.

That depends on the clock cycle latency but ceteris paribus yes, a higher frequency at the same timings would have higher bandwidth.

Even in benchmarks, I have generally seen very little performance gain with slightly faster memory.

The 15" sports a bigger battery than the 2017 model too. Just to compensate for DDR versus LPDDR.

Hold up, doesn't APFS mean that just copying files is instant because they're not being "physically" copied? Does anyone know if BlackMagic Disk Test actually touches the files?

Black magic writes files to disk however they should use a cross platform benchmark.

Great.

When can we get a pro MacBook Pro without the non-pro Touch Bar and with a pro reliable keyboard?

Agree, not useful. I have a 2017 with Touch Bar, and don't think I have used it more than a few times and that was just tinkering and boredom.

I use the hardware escape key and function keys dozens if not hundreds of times per work day, and like most touch typers the last thing I want to do is look down at my fingers ever to type anything, let alone at some microscopic screen to fidget around with some tiny screen menu system to find a weirdly indented digital escape key, brightness adjustments, audio buttons, or fn keys. It creates complexity where none was needed and where nobody asked for it.

I really have no idea who the Touch Bar was built for, or what it was made for. It's certainly not for pro users.

mapping escape onto caps lock, and setting the touch bar to simply be function keys has made the touch bar almost bearable, but I'd rather have a physical escape key.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com