It's possible that may contribute. But even my 1.5 year old NVMe Samsung 960 Pro has write speeds similar to that. It uses a standard form factor so I dropped it into a PCIe adapter and use with my 4 year old Z97 motherboard. Being able to do that makes me appreciate standards.

Fastest non PCIE drive I suppose? PCIE SSD drives are usually around that speed.

See this one from the Surface Book 2 which is from 2017:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12167/the-microsoft-surface-b...

2800MB/s sequential read and honestly once I went with PCIE SSD's I can't go back to regular SSD's only for secondary storage. Sad they soldered it on though. Good luck fixing that laptop when that drive fails...

It’s still PCIe just soldered on board.

Point being that benchmark is a little misleading claiming to be the fastest "hard drive" when it's just standard PCIE speeds.

I find that benchmark result to be naive at best.

Most of the performance gains, relative to other current PCIe SSDs, are likely due to the APFS file system stack, tuned with their specific hardware.

As they say, a performance win is a win, but the hyper-focus on Apple hardware (and consequent lack of understanding of the software stack) is misleading.

Haven’t the drives been soldered on board for quite a few years now? At least since the 2016 redesign, right?

Yes, but I still see people asking if there's user replaceable RAM in these things too.

Not in all models. The non-touchbar 2017 13" had an upgradeable ssd.

If you can find something to upgrade it with!

Well, yes, there's that. I assume you'd have to get one pulled from a busted machine on eBay.

Which caps your upgrade at whatever largest size Apple ever sold, which you may already have.

This isn't really true. Its a very non standard form factor, and I doubt you'll be able to find a third party version for many years, if ever.

The T2 chip now has the SSD controller on die so its probably the consolidation of that and other features that make this happen. See https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208862

I was frustrated when I learned the 2013 Mac Pro didn't have upgradeable SSDs... not because they aren't removable, but because they're proprietary and Apple won't sell you one. They will replace defective units with replacements of the same capacity only.

When the 2013 Mac Pro was introduced, their SSDs didn't use a standard connector so you couldn't buy a replacement drive but third parties then did make SSDs for the Mac Pro. What helped create the market for them was Apple used the same form factor in some laptop models.

https://www.owcdigital.com/products/aura-ssd

Well shit. I assumed I could upgrade my hardrive 5 years from now. External hard drive it’ll be I guess! Good thing usb-c is fast.

On a MacBook Pro they have Thunderbolt 3 ports.

Which are 4x faster than USB-C.

In case anyone else finds this tricky to remember, Thunderbolt 3 is a superset of USB-C.

https://thunderbolttechnology.net/blog/difference-between-us...

I see this claim a lot, but the fact that it's so often incompatible with USB-C peripherals gives it the lie.

USB-C is often incompatible with USB-C peripherals. It's not a lie, it's just a bunch of devices that all implement different parts of the spec.

The Thunderbolt 3 port is still there. The USB-C is also Thubderbolt 3 on the pros.

Performance looks great but being soldered in is disappointing. It's much nicer when RAM and disk is user upgradable.

I'm going to guess copy-on-write is 90% of what makes it fast:

"To be fair, Apple’s relatively new APFS file system is designed to speed up file copies using a technology Apple calls Instant Cloning. But a win is a win."

Copy on write should be WAY faster than that.

These numbers are similar to the iMac Pro, which uses a similar setup (T2, multiple flash chips).

I don’t think the benchmark was dumb enough to just be ‘cp fileOne fileTwo’, they would have taken the APFS instant copy into account.

Why you can't upgrade? Good engineer should be able to replace those chips, it's not exactly rocket science. Or those chips just don't available in China or they are somehow paired with motherboard and different ones won't work? For example I know that you could replace disk on iPhone for some reasonable money (less than buying new iPhone with higher capacity) in China, at least that was the case few years ago.

I believe the T2 chip is paired with the storage ones in the factory, or something like that.

You can bet the Chinese are already hard at work figuring out how to defeat Apple's DRM and provide repairs and upgrades, the way they've always done. Give it some time.

you’ll need to replace the NAND and the controller so good luck with that.