How Fast Is The 512 GB PCIe X4 SSD In The 2015 MacBook Pro?

When Apple announced the Early 2015 refresh of the 13" MacBook Pro with Retina Display, they revealed that the key updates would be the "all-new Force Touch trackpad, fifth generation Intel Core processors and Intel Iris Graphics 6100, two times faster flash and longer battery life".

For some reason, the significantly faster SSD was relegated almost to the end of the list, like an afterthought, when it represents the biggest leap in performance in the latest 13" MacBook Pro. How much of a leap? That's what we will be looking at today.

In this article, we will take a look at the performance of the 512 GB solid state drives of the latest 13" MacBook Pro (Early 2015), the last-generation 13" Apple MacBook Pro (Mid 2014) and SATA solid state drive of the Early 2013 Apple MacBook Pro. First, let's compare their specifications...

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The Solid State Drives

The latest 13" MacBook Pro (Early 2015) uses the Apple SM0512G SSD, which is manufactured by Samsung. It naturally uses all-Samsung components - the Samsung S4LN058A01 PCIe 3.0 x4 flash controller, and 19 nm Samsung NAND flash chips as well as a 512 MB Samsung K4E4E324ED LPDDR3 SDRAM module as cache.

Picture courtesy of iFixit

And here are its specifications, as generated by the OS X System Report :

The previous generation 13" MacBook Pro (Mid 2014) uses a Marvell 88SS9183 PCIe 2.0 x2 flash controller, and SanDisk NAND flash memory chips.

Picture courtesy of iFixit

The Apple SD512E SSD used in the Early 2013 MacBook Pro features the Samsung S4LN058X01 M.2 SSD controller and Samsung K9PHGY8S7C NAND flash chips.

Picture courtesy of iFixit

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