Article source: Qooah.com
9to5 Mac recently broke the news that it found some new revelations during a quick look inside the base M2 Pro MacBook Pro.
The latest 14-inch MacBook Pro base model in 2023 has fewer NAND chips than the previous generation, but higher die capacity than the base M2 MacBook Air. Such an approach will cause the read and write performance of the SSD to be much lower than that of the previous generation.
The base M1 and M2 MacBook Airs both come with 256GB SSDs. Among them, the M1 MacBook Air evenly distributes it to two 128GB Kioxia NAND chips. However, the M2 MacBook Air has adopted a new generation of NAND chips and has become a single 256GB NAND chip. Although the capacity has not changed, it is like a two-lane drive has become a single-lane drive, and the read and write performance of the SSD has been affected.
It is worth mentioning that the MacBook Pro also has a similar design idea. The storage space of the basic 512GB M1 MacBook Pro is composed of four 128GB NAND chips. The M2 MacBook Pro uses larger-capacity NAND chips with fewer chips.
9to5 Mac explained, “Since the M2 Pro MacBook Pro has significantly lower SSD performance, I wanted to take a look inside to confirm why. Sure enough, the 512GB M1 Pro MacBook Pro has two NAND dies on the front of the motherboard and two on the back, while the The M2 Pro MacBook Pro has only one visible on the front of the motherboard, and there may be a second NAND die directly alongside it, just like the M1.”
While the move to higher capacity NAND chips is the way to go, it would be somewhat disappointing to see similar performance degradation in previous generations. Fortunately, the difference in read and write performance can only be felt in extreme environments, and the impact in daily use is not great.
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