SSD technical specs in MacBook pros

eugeneth wrote:

I have been looking at getting a 14 MBP M4 Pro but I am looking for the technical specs of the solid stae drives that are installed in these machines.

Does anyone know what architercutre they use Nvme, Pcie2, m.2 etc? And also what are the read and write speeds etc?

I have looked all over the apple website but cant seem to find this information out!

Many thanks!

M-series macs are SoC (System on a Chip) soldiered direct to the board

ref: MacBook Pro (14-inch, M4 Pro or M4 Max, 2024)

ref: https://medium.com/@ThatAppleGuy/what-leaked-geekbench-scores-reveal-about-the-m4-macbook-pro-6fcd9d660a79

eugeneth wrote:

I have been looking at getting a 14 MBP M4 Pro but I am looking for the technical specs of the solid stae drives that are installed in these machines.

Does anyone know what architercutre they use Nvme, Pcie2, m.2 etc? And also what are the read and write speeds etc?

M.2 is not an architecture. It's a form factor and specification for small plug-in boards. The SSDs in Apple Silicon notebooks such as the M4 Pro MacBook Pro consist of two parts:

• Raw flash chips soldered directly to the motherboard
• A SSD controller which is part of the main System on Chip (e.g., the M4 Pro chip), and which handles things like encryption and decryption of most of the contents of the SSD in real time.

As such, internal SSD storage is not upgradable after purchase.

The speed of the internal SSDs is consistent with PCIe NVMe SSDs – but given that the SoC is doing part of the job that a M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD's flash controller would normally do, I can't swear that the interface is PCIe NVMe. Here the speed would be more relevant than the implementation details of how the MBP obtains it.

The Verge – Apple MacBook Pro M4 review: the Pro for everyone

A benchmarks comparison table in this article indicated that a M4 MBP had sustained SSD read/write speeds of (3253 MB/s, 3393 MB/s), while a M4 Pro MBP had ones of (6738 MB/s, 7500 MB/s).

I don't know what sizes of SSDs they were using in the two laptops. Higher-capacity SSDs are sometimes faster than lower-capacity ones.

Thunderbolt 3/4 and USB4 40 Gbps run at up to 5000 MB/s before overhead. Therefore, if this review is accurate, the M4 Pro MBP has an extremely fast SSD. As another point of comparison, the recently-introduced OWC Envoy Ultra SSD, which has a Thunderbolt 5 interface, can hit "over 6000 MB/s."