- Apple MacBook Pro M5 has a faster-than-expected SSD
- Apple said it's “up to 2x” faster than its M4 predecessor
- In fact, it is more than twice as fast, at least in terms of read speed, and in some scenarios perhaps 3 times faster.
MacBook Pro M5 really has serious speed SSDand in fact, Apple underestimated the drive performance in his laptop.
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 I ran a whole series of tests, including storage, and got a very unexpected result in terms of reading speed.
In terms of write speeds, the MacBook Pro M5 (with 512GB drive) achieved 6,068 MB/s in Blackmagic's drive speed test, compared to 3,293 MB/s for the M4 model. So that's about 1.85x faster and matches Apple's “up to 2x” claim (remember, “up to” is a best-case scenario estimate).
However, the M5's SSD completely outperformed the M4's read speed, reaching 6,323 MB/s compared to 2,031 MB/s – so the new laptop is actually more than 3 times faster in this test.
In short, Apple underestimated the speed on offer here and the generational leap in read performance of these drives. During our testing at Future Labs—on the 1TB SSDs from these MacBook Pro models, rather than the 512GB—we saw similar results.
Indeed, we recorded write speeds that were actually almost 2x faster on the M5 (around 1.95x) compared to the M4 model, but read speeds on the M5 were more like 2.3x faster – which is still extremely impressive and exceeds Apple's “up to 2x” expectations.
Analysis: What does this mean in practice?
So, it's clear that this SSD is a big upgrade over the MacBook Pro M4 and a real achievement for Apple. The gain when reading data from disk (as opposed to writing – copying data to disk) is quite phenomenal: in some circumstances it can be 3 times faster (and of course more than twice as fast, whichever way you choose it).
In practical terms, these much faster read speeds will greatly benefit the use case that Apple highlighted in its press release for the new MacBook Pro, which is “load local LLM faster.” This means that running an on-device AI model will be much more responsive on the MacBook Pro M5 (and Apple is of course actively working on improving AI performance these days – and it's not alone in such ambitions).
However, it's not just about artificial intelligence, it's also about reading any large, hefty file that might be on your MacBook Pro's drive, such as a large high-definition video clip that you might be about to edit, or perhaps some giant RAW photo files. Expect much better performance when it comes to load-intensive tasks like these.
There's not much to shout about about the new MacBook Pro, other than the M5 update, but it's somewhat surprising that Apple hasn't raised its marketing voice a little louder to herald this particular increase in performance levels.
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