Base model Apple M2 MacBook Pro SSD Up To 50% slower than M1 MacBook Pro SSD | Half the NAND chips, half the speed

[Obioban]

Really, if you're doing the kind of work where it's an issue, you shouldn't just be on a larger storage tier (though you should)-- you should be on a 14" or 16" MBP. 1 external display probably isn't up to the task, the media engine is better on the M1 Pro/Max, you can have more ram on them, and the storage is faster than the M1/2 at any config. Plus, for video editing, the screen itself is significantly better on the 14"/16".

 

The 13" Pro is kind of a no mans land product in general. If you're workflow requires the fan, you should be on a 14" Pro anyway. If it doesn't, you should be on the Air. 

[Paul Thexton]

I think I'm still going to stick with my opinion that most people who buy the base spec model most likely won't notice the degraded performance. And most people who are going to be doing some heavy lifting with their laptop will be buying at minimum 512GB storage.

[Roswell]

13 minutes ago, leadeater said:

As per the documentation for Premiere CC 2019 nope it is in fact default to same as project folder. 

I'd like to see a source for Photoshop. Mainly because Photoshop doesn't use project folders as Premiere does, so I would find it incredible if Photoshop could magically store scratch by default into project folders that don't exist in the first place.

 

13 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Please quit acting like I said it's this way for all software and not what I actually said.

One would assume you were referring to Photoshop in a conversation about Photoshop, not Premiere.

 

I'll reiterate that I normally wouldn't nitpick this hard... but you're claiming to know more about people's job requirements than the people that actually perform said work with what looks like nearly zero experience in the field. You wouldn't be misfiring on all of these facts over and over otherwise.

[Paul Thexton]

Usage of /tmp (or /private/tmp) tends to be a rarity on macOS, I've never actually looked and although I guess that could be where Photoshop puts the scratch info (it would be more analogous to writing to the C: tmp folder on Windows), my guess is that it's more likely the data gets written in to the User's ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/etc folder structure.

 

 

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, Paul Thexton said:

I keep reading the figure of over 1GB/s being quoted in this thread, just feel I should point out that the people who’ve done the benchmarks on the slower based spec are seeing in the region of 1,500MB/s for both read and write.

 

As an enthusiast amateur photographer I don’t do anything heavy duty enough in photoshop to warrant worrying about scratch disks, but the last time I read about them Adobe were recommending that your scratch disks should be different to the disk containing your actual work. So I’d be surprised if people were using the internal, space limited 256GB SSD for the purpose?

This has, and always was the case when people could only stick a maximum of 4 IDE drives, or 7 SCSI drives in a desktop. You were encouraged to spread the read/write load off the primary drive. You were also encouraged to do this with the swapfile/swap-partition for programs that didn't build their own scratch files. With the advent of SSD's, sure you could do this, but you need to take into account the performance characteristics of what you're doing.

 

4 SATA SSDs (2GB/s potential bandwidth) is still slower than a single 4 lane PCIe 3.0 (maximum 4GB/s.) So if you have a mixture of everything (like I do), you would use the fastest drive for the OS, Programs only. The next fastest drive as the "work drive" for data, and the SATA drives (be it SSD or HDD) as read-only drives. I've literately maxed out everything on this machine, I wound up connecting all the previous hard drive on USB 3.x enclosures, but had to connect them to the same hub and port, which means I can't use them simultaneously, otherwise the bandwidth will drop. Though even then USB 3.0 is 600MB/sec, all my drives are 7200RPM drives that can do 100MB+/sec.

 

When you work on photoshop (or clip studio paint, or various other programs that deal with layers) the "layers" are stored in the system memory, but the undo-steps are stored on the scratch files. 

[leadeater]

6 minutes ago, Roswell said:

One would assume you were referring to Photoshop in a conversation about Photoshop, not Premiere.

You would assume that, I have more faith that he is actually reading what I write and base that on my past conversations with him. You are not him. What isn't said hasn't been said, real simple.

 

You have a habit of making assumptions and with zero shame when the assumptions are misplaced.

 

6 minutes ago, Roswell said:

You wouldn't be misfiring on all of these facts over and over otherwise.

So claimed by you, yet my peroneal opinion of your professional knowledge is zero so I don't care what you think. Not that you care what I think either I suspect.

 

With your demonstrated and continued lack of bothering to read and argue things not said what justification should I have to continue to converse with you or ever change my opinion about your knowledge?

[Paul Thexton]

2 minutes ago, Kisai said:

When you work on photoshop (or clip studio paint, or various other programs that deal with layers) the "layers" are stored in the system memory, but the undo-steps are stored on the scratch files. 

That makes a great deal of sense. I've never really done anything massively outrageous in Photoshop that really pushes my system, so I've never really felt the need to really understand what's happening under the hood.  The most I'll ever do is the occasional adjustment mask to help balance the exposure of a photo the way I want it, which normally I only need to do if I did a poor job taking the photo in the first place, most of the time I don't feel the need to do anything outside of Lightroom.

 

I did try out Affinity Photo recently as I'm getting sick of software as a service from Adobe.... I hadn't realised it doesn't do library management though, and instead you end up with a copy of each raw file inside it's own proprietary document format for each image ... very disappointing   I might give darktable a try again as an alternative to Lightroom, last time I tried it a few years ago I was really disappointed with it's stability.

[Dracarris]

1 hour ago, AluminiumTech said:

Because despite using different memory subsystems and architectures the physical capacity is still the same and nothing will ever make 8GB RAM become 16GB, even quadrupling the memory bandwidth won't fix that.

Except memory compression which Apple uses and the fact that macOS does a much better job a generally requiring less memory, both things that we have discussed in countless other threads, yet you chose to go again at it.

 

1 hour ago, AluminiumTech said:

8GB unified memory is equal to 8GB of non unified memory.

Which totally wasn't my point. If you like it or not these 8GB machines will serve alot of people just right and you claim about ewaste right after purchase is just bullocks.

 

1 hour ago, AluminiumTech said:

Different CPU architectures and ISAs are designed around different clock speeds. Apple Silicon seems to be designed for around 3GHz maxmimum speed (plus or minus 10%) which makes sense cos that's basically the limit for ARM CPU cores so far. Anything faster would likely not result in any meaningful performance improvement and would destroy the main advantage ARM has over x86, power efficiency.

And yet you compare x GB of RAM on AS ARM with macOS to x GB of RAM on an x86 Windows laptop (where 8GB is really too little for most users).

[Dracarris]

1 hour ago, HenrySalayne said:

So you're saying Apple-Bytes can store 2x more information than all other Bytes? And using only 1/3 of the RAM channels doesn't impact performance?

And memory swapping to counter low RAM availability isn't slowed down by a trash tier SSD?

you might need to inform yourself how macOS manages and compresses RAM. And no they won't store 2x more raw bytes which is not needed. 8GB can even on Intel Macs do a lot especially if you use Safari which is much better optimized not only in terms of RAM usage but basically in every resource aspect as well as integration into the OS.

 

And 1Gbyte/s is NOT trash tier ffs, JFC the stunts people pull again as soon as it goes against Apple, mind blowing.

[Roswell]

14 minutes ago, Paul Thexton said:

I did try out Affinity Photo recently as I'm getting sick of software as a service from Adobe.... I hadn't realised it doesn't do library management though, and instead you end up with a copy of each raw file inside it's own proprietary document format for each image ... very disappointing   I might give darktable a try again as an alternative to Lightroom, last time I tried it a few years ago I was really disappointed with it's stability.

Yeah Affinity is great if you have something else to handle ingesting/batch editing your photos. It also sucks for plugin support, stuff like Topaz and Luminar barely work, if at all.

 

The one thing I wish Photoshop would steal from them is nondestructive rasterized scaling though. 

 

21 minutes ago, leadeater said:

You would assume that, I have more faith that he is actually reading what I write and base that on my past conversations with him. You are not him. What isn't said hasn't been said, real simple.

 

You have a habit of making assumptions and with zero shame when the assumptions are misplaced.

 

So claimed by you, yet my peroneal opinion of your professional knowledge is zero so I don't care what you think. Not that you care what I think either I suspect.

 

With your demonstrated and continued lack of bothering to read and argue things not said what justification should I have to continue to converse with you or ever change my opinion about your knowledge?

You continued to allude to the idea that speeds in excess of a certain value wouldn’t benefit an entire industry of work.

 

I say “hey, that’s definitely not right, that goes directly against my experience in said industry”

 

You then go on to say I’m bad at my job multiple times, don’t know what I’m talking about and demanding system logs all while admitting you have zero professional experience in media. 
 

Mix in you stumbling over the basics of how the Adobe suite works and here we are.

 

So yes, I’m making some broad assumptions about your lack of knowledge in the area because you’ve done nothing but demonstrate a complete lack of knowledge in the professional media space.

[Paul Thexton]

3 minutes ago, Roswell said:

Yeah Affinity is great if you have something else to handle ingesting/batch editing your photos. It also sucks for plugin support, stuff like Topaz and Luminar barely work, if at all.

 

The one thing I wish Photoshop would steal from them is nondestructive rasterized scaling though. 

Yep. It’s my bad for not researching properly in the first place, but it’s very much more Photoshop like than Lightroom like. At least it wasn’t an expensive purchase.

 

I’m going to give darktable another go, if they’ve addressed the issues I had with it last time then a combination of that + affinity means I can stop throwing a monthly sub at Adobe for what to me is basically an expensive hobby.

[Paul Thexton]

9 minutes ago, Dracarris said:

you might need to inform yourself how macOS manages and compresses RAM. And no they won't store 2x more raw bytes which is not needed. 8GB can even on Intel Macs do a lot especially if you use Safari which is much better optimized not only in terms of RAM usage but basically in every resource aspect as well as integration into the OS.

Keep in mind that for text data Windows typically uses UTF-16 for historical reasons, meaning that at least with English alphabets they’re using two bytes for every character where one will do. That doesn’t help Windows memory management.

 

I definitely don’t miss writing code for Windows having to put that bloody _T() macro everywhere.

[Blademaster91]

3 hours ago, HenrySalayne said:

Apple's behaviour makes me angry. They advertise their ultra powerful M2 processor (Supercharged!) and they ship basically e-waste in the base configuration. The SSD is trash and only 8 GB of RAM are a joke in 2022. And all of this under the name "Macbook Pro" in a device with zero upgrade-ability. The base model Macbook Pro is probably the least sustainable and future-proof device they ever made. It costs an eye-watering 31% more ($400) to buy a configuration that's not already outdated at the point of ordering.

Apple's behavior of making the lower end model worse in a significant way to get consumers to spend more because there isn't a middle tier product isn't anything new, and it isn't too surprising considering they've been throwing the "pro" marketing name on things that aren't a "pro grade" device like phones with glass backings or bluetooth headphones. It seems like the 13" macbook pro is in a segment that makes no sense unless someone needs the touchbar for some reason, i think it should be just called a macbook, it shouldn't have the pro naming, at least on the 256GB version.

14 minutes ago, Dracarris said:

Except memory compression which Apple uses and the fact that macOS does a much better job a generally requiring less memory, both things that we have discussed in countless other threads, yet you chose to go again at it.

A memory compression system and a different architecture won't solve running out of RAM if you want to do any serious work on a 13" macbook pro, and swapping to disk is going to be terribly slow compared to having 16GB of ram as the SSD speeds are comparable to a $40-50 QLC PCI-e 3.0 SSD.

14 minutes ago, Dracarris said:

And yet you compare x GB of RAM on AS ARM with macOS to x GB of RAM on an x86 Windows laptop (where 8GB is really too little for most users).

What exactly makes the 8GB of ram on a AS ARM laptop any more special? 8GB is still 8GB, and its a $1,400 laptop which I think is a ridiculously low amount of ram for a laptop of that price.

[HenrySalayne]

4 minutes ago, Dracarris said:

And 1Gbyte/s is NOT trash tier ffs, JFC the stunts people pull again as soon as it goes against Apple, mind blowing.

You're right. Comparing Apple to Apple - in the literal sense - is really unfair towards Apple. They never made a big deal out of their storage speed*, they didn't use speed as an argument for soldering the storage on the mainboard* and all their other models are not faster*.

 

*) statements might contain sarcasm or irony

[Dracarris]

1 minute ago, Blademaster91 said:

What exactly makes the 8GB of ram on a AS ARM laptop any more special?

I won't explain it for the third time in this thread.

[hishnash]

3 hours ago, HenrySalayne said:

They never made a big deal out of their storage speed*, they didn't use speed as an argument for soldering the storage on the mainboard* and all their other models are not faster*.

 

*) statements might contain sarcasm or irony

I think apple have only every quoted peak SSD perfomance (on the highest capacity option).

I would be extremely surprised if any apple PR person ever got into the details of why SSDs are soldered rather than socketed.

And the reason for this is not raw speed but rather perf/W and space.  Having the SSD controller within the 5nm+ SOC that can share the SLC and system Memory saves quite a bit of power (and space) when you consider how little power the E-cores draw.

 

Sure they could use the on package controller with custom socketed NAND (like the studio) but you still have extra space and some extra power for that solution. These custom socketed NAND modules are also more costly as they pipe the SSD signal over a PCIe sub-protocol so need a PCIe timing and controlling chip on each of the modules (power, space and $). 

If there was no downside to just using NVMe then apple would do this as it would make production simple as they would not need to make multiple different skews of mainboards with different soldered memory and could (like the macPro and macStudio) do final storage configuration at a later point in the supply chain this means they do not need to forecast the exact distribution of storage sizes from the get go of production. But with a device as high volume as their laptops they can be confident that even if they get the distribution of storage configurations wrong the surplus of a given capacity will not end up sitting on selves for long. With the 13" MBP they currently have 3 different memory configurations and 4 different storage sizes that means 12 different combinations of mainboards they need to pre-fabricate and predict the different popularity of each combination. 
 

[Obioban]

15 hours ago, Blademaster91 said:

What exactly makes the 8GB of ram on a AS ARM laptop any more special? 8GB is still 8GB, and its a $1,400 laptop which I think is a ridiculously low amount of ram for a laptop of that price.

MacOS, and the bundled software, requires less RAM. Nothing to do with AS/ARM, everything to do with MacOS/Safari/etc.

 

If you buy an 8gb Apple laptop, and use it to run safari/mail/messages/pages/keynote/etc, it'll be a completely fine experience. This is how the majority of users function. Charging them more (raising the base tier) would not be an improvement.

[saltycaramel]

18 hours ago, HenrySalayne said:

You're right. Comparing Apple to Apple - in the literal sense - is really unfair towards Apple. They never made a big deal out of their storage speed*, they didn't use speed as an argument for soldering the storage on the mainboard* and all their other models are not faster*.

 

*) statements might contain sarcasm or irony

 

Apple’s competitors claim their PCs are laptops but you have to use them plugged in to have 100% performance and work all day, so there’s that, if we’re going by claims and “making a big deal out of sth”.

 

I’ll take Apple using a fast-but-not-as-fast SSD in the base capacity MBP every day of the week.

[saltycaramel]

22 hours ago, HenrySalayne said:

The SSD is trash

 

20 hours ago, HenrySalayne said:

trash tier SSD

 

How to lose credibility, Apple hater's oil on canvas, circa 2022. 

[HenrySalayne]

1 hour ago, saltycaramel said:

Apple’s competitors claim their PCs are laptops but you have to use them plugged in to have 100% performance and work all day, so there’s that, if we’re going by claims and “making a big deal out of sth”.

Please stay on topic. We are just comparing Apples to Apples.

 

 

 

Which somehow seems to drive Apple fanboys crazy.

[saltycaramel]

Apple is laughing all the way to the bank thanks to base-better-best psychology tricks to nudge people into upgrading storage capacities, they owe it to their shareholders to optimize their returns in such (and other) ways, but even people getting the base model are getting a superbly built, fast, powerful machine with crazy long battery life, so people like @HenrySalayne are getting “angry” for nothing. The SSD is plenty fast for a 256GB base model and no actual user will ever care.

[leadeater]

On 6/29/2022 at 9:16 AM, Roswell said:

I say “hey, that’s definitely not right, that goes directly against my experience in said industry”

No, you started that and I said I explicitly refrained from doing similar until you did it multiple times, so you get what you give in kind, remember that.

 

On 6/29/2022 at 9:16 AM, Roswell said:

You then go on to say I’m bad at my job multiple times, don’t know what I’m talking about and demanding system logs all while admitting you have zero professional experience in media.

False, I said I do not actively use the software not that I have zero professional experience in media. As stated providing infrastructure storage for this very purpose is my experience which is not zero, far from zero.

 

On the software side I know how to configure and diagnose it and work with the actual users of the software as and when is required. Day to day usage of it is not a requirement here for this topic.

 

On 6/29/2022 at 9:16 AM, Roswell said:

You continued to allude to the idea that speeds in excess of a certain value wouldn’t benefit an entire industry of work.

False, I said for the 256GB M2 Mac the speeds of this device would be fine and nobody would notice this change. I also said above 1GB/s is adequate for almost every video format, which is true. For this device of this capacity the performance available is perfectly adequate, the specific context which you ignored, which is just so great when you roll out the "I was talking about Photoshop" line. I guess you have a free pass card to ignore context and actual discussion point/topic and I do not 

 

I also said any more than what is necessary doesn't provide benefit, note the word necessary. Now we can debate what we each think necessary actually is but that's not productive now is it? I also feel it wouldn't even be fruitful because you have demonstrated you don't actually know what the applications you work with do on the storage side and are firmly in the camp of "bigger = better" without even knowing what the performance usage actually is, which was pretty much the point in the first place which you didn't get.

 

On 6/29/2022 at 9:16 AM, Roswell said:

don’t know what I’m talking about and demanding system logs

Because that is a requirement to actually show an application is actually, in reality, using and generating a specific amount of I/O throughput. This is very basic storage administration performance analysis and monitoring. Just because you have an SSD that can do [x] amount of GB/s at [y] block size and queue depth doesn't mean application [z] is doing that.

 

You would know this if you had any real experience in storage. You may well be an expert in using the related software in the field, I may or may not be willing to acknowledge that, that doesn't make you an expert in this field when it comes to storage.

 

"Stay in your lane, don't pretend to be an expert in an area you know mothing about about". Or instead of making these type of statements or insinuations don't be a jerk and start a conversation on a better footing then you wouldn't have to fall in to the trap of trying to defend a position on the basis of not comprehending what was said and unwillingness to make adequate assessments.

 

On 6/29/2022 at 9:16 AM, Roswell said:

Mix in you stumbling over the basics of how the Adobe suite works and here we are.

Nope, you just didn't bother reading what was said because at every point software names were specified when required, don't shift your own failing over to me. Also my comments started and were about video editing, the discussions were about video editing. You wanted to shift it to photo editing which is well fine so long as you don't try and mix these discussion together like you were and then pretend there is some kind of gotcha going on. Also don't change what is clearly general comments about broader types of software and how that can be different even from the same vendor and make it out as if I was talking about one software from one vendor, again comes back to you lack of reading and arguing for the sake of arguing.

 

If you want to keep arguing this I invite you to take it to PM with yourself and argue with yourself, this is my last contribution to this, as much as I wasn't even going to bother with this reply.

[igormp]

On 6/28/2022 at 6:11 PM, Dracarris said:

Except memory compression which Apple uses and the fact that macOS does a much better job a generally requiring less memory, both things that we have discussed in countless other threads, yet you chose to go again at it.

It doesn't, 8gb is still 8gb, the advantage comes out of fast ram and nvme so one can easily swap stuff in and out quickly, which is great for smaller, non-demanding apps, but by the time you open a single, large application it'll crawl to a halt. And since the nvme is now slower in this specific model, a M1 256gb may feel faster than a M2 256gb once you start swapping.

 

Memory compression also only works for inactive data, as soon as you open a chrome tab it gets uncompressed so you can use it. As an example showing how memory usage is the same between an intel or m1 mac, you could try to do something similar to this: https://stackoverflow.com/q/66198308/4542015

 

On 6/28/2022 at 6:15 PM, Dracarris said:

you might need to inform yourself how macOS manages and compresses RAM. And no they won't store 2x more raw bytes which is not needed. 8GB can even on Intel Macs do a lot especially if you use Safari which is much better optimized not only in terms of RAM usage but basically in every resource aspect as well as integration into the OS.

As someone who's using an intel MBP with 16gb of ram, it barely makes a difference and ram usage is similar to my linux desktop, but with 4x less ram meaning that it often starts swapping data, gets slow af and I need to close stuff up.

 

I used a 8GB M1 MBA for a while and managed to keep making it slow af due to the memory usage. There's no magic here, once you fill the ram it's going to be slow, and having more ram does help if you really need it:

(source)

 

However, if you don't really use much more than 8gb, and all of your stuff consists of small chrome tabs that can be easily swapped in/out of the fast NVMe drive, then it for sure won't matter.

[Obioban]

14 minutes ago, igormp said:

However, if you don't really use much more than 8gb, and all of your stuff consists of small chrome tabs that can be easily swapped in/out of the fast NVMe drive, then it for sure won't matter.

If you're using Chrome, 8gb is not enough. 16gb is borderline, if you're using Chrome.

[Dracarris]

22 minutes ago, igormp said:

I used a 8GB M1 MBA for a while and managed to keep making it slow af due to the memory usage. There's no magic here, once you fill the ram it's going to be slow, and having more ram does help if you really need it:

(source)

 

However, if you don't really use much more than 8gb, and all of your stuff consists of small chrome tabs that can be easily swapped in/out of the fast NVMe drive, then it for sure won't matter.

These workloads are probably not exactly the thing people do on a base model MBP. OFC you can find applications where you have so much raw data that 8GB is not enough. Apart from that macOS does a better job at managing resources and the memory compression helps during actual every-day use cases.

 

And why you would want to use Chrome instead of the much better optimized and integrated Safari is a bit beyond me, but whatever, choices, and the freedom to chose in a suboptimal way.