escargot

Aaroncz said:

Apparently the M2 Pro Mac Mini base model (16GB ram, 512GB SSD) only has a single 512GB Nand chip.  However the 14" MacBook Pro has a 256 nand chip on either side of it's motherboard in the 512GB ssd model (maybe*).  So the 14" MacBook Pro gets almost double the disc speed in the Blackmagic test because it's in a raid configuration (maybe*). 
Here's the motherboard of the M2 Pro Mac Mini (single 512GB chip in green rectangle).  It looks to be flat on the table - no second nand chip on the other side.

Thanks for sharing that link, it was very informative.  However, I believe you are mistaken about the NAND chip on the Mac mini.  They show both sides of the M2 Pro 512GB board, and you can see very clearly that there is a chip on both sides, meaning that there are 2 NAND chips for the 512GB model, not one.

Aaroncz said:

"As it turns out, the 512GB M2 Mac mini also features a single NAND chip, meaning that it would still have slower read/write speeds than a model with two 256GB chips."

Has this been confirmed?  Someone commenting on Brandon's Blackmagic Speedtest says "With my new  M2 Pro mac mini i just brought home from Applestore I get double that speed with 512/16, nearly 3000+ with the internal 512SSD! (Bernd Hofmann)"

Brandon Geekabit's Blackmagic Speedtest says that the base model M2 Mac Mini 256GB model runs at 1500-1600Gbps.  

It sounds like a few things are being conflated here, and it's a bit confusing, so I will try to share what I've learned from this article, the 9to5 Mac article (which had actual benchmarks), some YouTube teardowns, professional reviews and user-reported benchmarks.

• The M1 Pro 512GB computers had actually four 128GB NAND chips, giving them about 4000 read 5000 write performance (MB/s)
• The M2 Pro 512GB computers have two 256 NAND chips, reducing the performance to about 3000/3000 MB/s (NOT one 512GB chip as mistakenly reported in this article).  But this is still much better than the performance of the base level 256GB M2 regular machines.
• M2 Pro Computers with 1TB or more have four NAND chips, giving them even better performance than M1 Pro, at 5000 read and 6000 write

When it comes to the M2 regular computers, things are a bit different.  The issue is having 1 chip rather than 2 (vs 2 rather than 4 on the pro models)

• The M1 Mac mini 256GB had two NAND chips, with 2880 MB/s read speeds and 2300 MB/s write speeds 
• The M2 Mac mini 256GB has one NAND chip, with 1440 MB/s read and write speeds
• It's not yet clear what the 512GB M2 mini is using, but I expect it to use two nand chips, giving it around 2800 read/write.  This is unconfirmed.

So, while the new M2 Pro computers with the base 512GB storage do have fewer NAND chips than their M1 Pro counterparts, they actually have two rather than four.  Not one, as was mistakenly stated in the article.  The one chip issue is true for the M2 regular models however, so it's easy to get confused.

It's not yet clear whether the 512GB M2 regular mini has only one NAND chip rather than two, but I think it's unlikely that it would have only one.  I think the author was getting confused between the M2 regulars and M2 Pro models (the 512 M2 Pro is reduced, but not from 2 to 1, but rather from 4 to 2).

The YouTuber MaxTech, who used to work for this site will be benchmarking all the different configs once they have all arrived.  But so far he has only posted about the 256GB M2 Regular model.  The 9to5Mac article did benchmarks with the 512GB M2 Pro model, and many reviewers posted results with the 1TB or higher models.  What I have not yet seen are any benchmarks of the 512GB M2 Regular model.  But I expect it to have similar performance to the M2 512GB config in the MBA and 13" Pro, which uses two NAND chips, not one like the 256GB.

Finally, it should be noted that there can be a lot of variance in performance of SSDs, even among the same capacity based on manufacturing variances and also sometimes Apple has used different vendors for parts for the same SKUs.  For example, I have seen the M1 Pro SSDs benchmark as high as 7000 read and 5400 write, but the 9to5Mac author was only getting 4000 and 5000.

I hope someone will post other disk benchmarking stats soon, such as 4K random read/writes from something like Amorphous Diskmark. These kinds of stats are in many cases more important for perceived performance than sustained sequential transfer of large files. 

jdw said:

While I appreciate this article very much, it surprisingly overlooks the obvious fact that the Air lacks an internal fan and therefore can and does limit performance during sustained operations.  Please consider adding some details about throttling in future articles on the Air which pertain to performance.  Anything less could be construed as being misleading.  Knowing how the lack of an internal fan affects performance is a key consideration that needs to be presented to the reader.  Thanks!

Actually the M1 air didn’t throttle very much, even under very heavy load. Check out MaxTech benchmarks/tests on YouTube 

MplsP said:

The limiting factor of the USB A cable wasn’t the cable, it was the 5w charger. If you’d put it on a 20W USB A charger it would have matched the USB C cable. 

Actually iPhones can’t charge with more than 12W via USB A. For anything beyond 12 you will require a USB C lightning cable