Is Apple lying to us?
Or is it all just in our heads?
Well, guys, today, we're going to be testing the SSD speed
of the new M1 Pro MacBooks.
Now, Apple says they can do up
to 7.4 gigabits per section read speeds,
which is more than twice the 3.3 gigabits
per second they claim
with the SSDs in the previous generation M1 Macs.
So in this video, we're going to
be double checking Apple's claim,
and we're also going to be doing some real-life testing,
transferring some files on and off the internal SSD
to see just how fast it actually is.
So before we get into testing,
let me throw up a screen recording
of me doing the same test on my M1 MacBook Pro,
the 2020 model with a 256-gigabyte SSD.
As you can see there,
the write is anywhere from about 2,000
to 2,400 megabytes per second.
And the read is about 2,800
but give or take a couple of hundred on either side
just because every SSD
in every computer is slightly different.
So with that figure fresh in your mind,
let's run that same test
on this 16-inch M1 Pro MacBook Pro.
And as we can see, guys,
straightaway, I don't think Apple was lying.
So when Apple says more than twice as fast,
I think they're actually underselling that a little bit.
This is pretty damn quick.
Okay, so let's stop that.
By the way, if you guys are interested,
I'm using the five-gigabyte stress test.
Okay, so let's close down Blackmagic Disk Speed Test.
And as you guys can see here,
I have a external SSD.
Now, this is a Thunderbolt-capable SSD.
It's from Sabrent.
It's the XTRM-Q.
It's a four-terabyte.
Awesome, awesome external hard drive.
It is a bit premium.
I will put a link down below
if you guys want to check it out.
I use it all the time, it's great.
Super, super fast.
But nowhere near as fast as the internal SSD
on this Mac.
Now, a quick side note as well.
Did you know it only costs 200 US dollars
to double your internal storage on these Macs
from 512 gigabytes to one terabyte?
Previously, and I've made videos on the channel about this,
I always thought that the storage upgrades
on Macs were a rip off.
This one totally makes sense
and I actually think it's a bit of a bargain
because the speeds of these SSDs,
you really can't get them anywhere else on the market
at the moment.
Okay, so let's have a look at some real-world testing.
So you can see, this particular folder here,
I'm going to click get info,
and you can see, we have 173 gigabytes
on this particular folder.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to drag and drop
onto the desktop.
And we're going to let that go.
And we're going to have a quick look here
at the SSD speed test.
So that is going at 2.6 gigabytes per second.
As you can see there, going very, very quickly.
Less than 60 seconds to transfer almost 200 gigabytes
of files and photos.
And this is a mixture of 24 megapixel raw photos,
some 4K GoPro, 4K Sony A7S III.
8K RED RAW and also, 6K BRAW.
All those different kind of codex.
And you can see now,
we're about halfway through.
It is fluctuating a little bit on my tool
but we're sitting at about 2.5 gigabytes
per second transfer speed.
So that definitely seems to be going very, very quickly.
You can see there that our peak is 2.7 gigabytes per second.
Now, a quick note as well, guys.
This is rated at about 2,500 to 2,800 megabytes per second.
So this is going to be the bottleneck,
not the internal SSD on the Mac.
And I think that's something you're going to run into a lot
with how fast these things are.
There's nothing that you can attach
to this Mac, not even a super fast NAS,
not even a super expensive premium SSD like this
that's going to not be a bottleneck in this situation.
Okay, so we're just about to finish.
We've got five seconds left.
And that is now done.
So as you guys can see,
almost 200 gigabytes of files transferred
in two minutes and eight seconds.
That's very impressive.
So what we'll do now is we'll simply rename this
to Test 2.
We're going to reset the timer
and we're going to drag it back on to test the write speed,
and I'll see you guys in a couple seconds.
Okay, we're just about to finish.
There we go, so one minute and 33 seconds
to transfer that back on.
So as you can see, the write speed
from the internal SSD to an external SSD
is about 25% quicker.
Now, a really common thing I think a lot
of you guys are going to be doing
is transferring photos to and from the internal SSD.
Now, video files are slightly different.
You're probably going to be having them
on an external Thunderbolt drive
because, at least for me personally,
each of these projects can be up to half a terabyte
in raw footage.
Now, as you can see here,
we have 50 raw 24-megapixel photos,
and what I'm going to do
is I'm just going to give guys an idea
of how quickly they can transfer to and from.
So let's drag it onto the desktop.
We'll hit the start button.
And we'll see how quickly that, and it's done.
Okay.
That was about three seconds.
Okay, it totally makes sense.
So as you guys can see there,
if you've got
two and a half gigabytes of raw photos,
you can literally transfer them
in about a second and a half to or from.
So that is pretty impressive,
at least to me personally.
Anyway, guys, thanks for watching this video.
Any comments or questions,
you know what to do.
And I'll catch you in the next one.