M2 MacBook Pro’s 256GB SSD is only about half as fast as the M1 version’s

arstechnica.com

22 points·FridayoLeary··3 comments

Apparently, the new baseline Mac is built with a NAND flash chip that's twice as dense as the previous model.

The M1 256GB SSD has both channels populated, each with a 128GB NAND stack. The new M2 has only a single channel populated.

Speculation is that supply-chain issues forced Apple to go with this slower design at the 256GB configuration.

I have always felt Mac disk IO operations to be incredibly slow. I think the problem has gotten worse since Mac started to "phone home" every time you run a new executable, etc.

When running something there is a noticable delay. On Linux it's instant. This can be felt with the terminal especially.

Macs always get good benchmarks when it comes to disk speed, and I think the software then lets it down. APFS was disappointing (although maybe thats changed now),

Finder could take as long to list a large folder as Explorer on a grotty spinning rust PC would. Even on my swanky new M1 mac, browsing through the disk has a noticeable lag when compared with Windows or Linux.

Builtin Archive utility is noticeably slower than alternatives too, which makes things like XCode updates particularly slow even after you've finished downloading.

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