• Apple’s MacBook Pro M5 has a faster-than-expected SSD
• Apple said it was ‘up to 2x’ faster than its M4 predecessor
• In fact, it’s well over twice as fast, at least for read speeds, and possibly more like 3x as quick in some scenarios

The MacBook Pro M5 really does have a seriously speedy SSD, and in fact, Apple has underplayed the performance of the drive in its laptop.

9to5Mac noticed that while Apple boasted that the new MacBook Pro offers “up to 2x faster SSD performance” compared to its M4-based predecessor, Max Tech on YouTube ran a whole battery of tests, including storage, with a very surprising result for the read speeds.

When it came to write speeds, the MacBook Pro M5 (with 512GB drive) achieved 6,068MB/s in the Blackmagic disk speed test compared to 3,293MB/s for the M4 model. So, that’s about 1.85x faster and in line with Apple’s ‘up to 2x’ claim (remember, ‘up to’ means a ballpark figure for a best-case scenario).

However, for read speeds, the SSD in the M5 absolutely blew away the drive in the M4, hitting 6,323MB/s compared to 2,031MB/S – so the new laptop is over 3x faster, in fact, in this test.

In short, Apple has underrated the speed on offer here, and the generational jump in these drives for read performance. During our testing at the Future Labs – on 1TB SSDs from these MacBook Pro models, as opposed to 512GB – we found similar results.

Indeed, we recorded write speeds that were actually closer to 2x faster with the M5 (around 1.95x) compared to M4 model, but read speeds were more like 2.3x faster for the M5 – which is still extremely impressive, and outguns the ‘up to 2x’ expectation Apple gave us.

Analysis: what does this mean in practice?

Clearly, then, this SSD is a big upgrade over the MacBook Pro M4 and quite an achievement for Apple. The boost when reading data off the drive (as opposed to writing – copying data onto the drive) is quite phenomenal in terms of being up to 3x as fast in some circumstances (and certainly well over twice as fast, whichever way you dice it).

In practical terms, that much faster read speed is going to be very beneficial for the use case that Apple highlighted in its press release for the new MacBook Pro – namely, to “load a local LLM faster”. This means using an AI model on-device is going to be a lot more responsive on the MacBook Pro M5 (and Apple is, of course, going big on boosting AI performance these days – and it’s not alone in that ambition).

This isn’t just about AI, though, but reading any big, hefty file that might be on your MacBook Pro’s drive, such as a large high-res video clip that you might be settling down to edit, or some gargantuan RAW photo files, perhaps. Expect much nippier performance when it comes to intensive loading tasks such as these.

There isn’t all that much to shout about with the new MacBook Pro, outside of the M5 upgrade, but it’s somewhat surprising that Apple didn’t raise its marketing voice a bit more loudly to trumpet this particular advance in performance levels.

Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button!

And of course you can also follow TechRadar on TikTok for news, reviews, unboxings in video form, and get regular updates from us on WhatsApp too.

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel – ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ – was published by Hachette UK in 2013).