I hate autocorrect!
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
256 GB vs 512 GB with 16 GB Unified Memory
- Thread starter J|M
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
To give you an example. As a developper I install a lot of packages (node_modules for example) which contains a lot of files. On this particular case the write speed can speed up the process, especially when installing every packages from a project.
It depends on how you will use it, many will say faster is always better because they only look at specs, not use case. Plus it’s not their money.
Looking at a bell curve your use case is on the high end, not mainstream. Right tool for the job at the best price.
One is RAM the other is disc drive with virtual memory. That is used very differently.Hey beautiful people,
I was reading an article here the other day stating that the 256 GB MBA will be a bit slower than the 512 GB.
I'm wondering if I upgrade to the 16 GB unified memory, will that compensate for the slower 256 GB? I don't need the 512, so if anyone can chime in I would sincerely appreciate it.
Thank you
Personally, I wouldn’t get a machine less than 512 SSD and 16 GB of Ram. I have found that even for single task machines, such as content playback or streaming, the added space makes for a noticeably faster machine.
Base MBA M2 is excellent for you. It is In fact a lot more than what you need.
The “slow“ transfer speeds people talk about are just because SSD speeds have gone up a lot in the last few years. The speed you’re getting on a stock M2 is probably more that what they used to make Monsters Inc.
It isn’t big deal, random write/read speed is more important for lot of files.I have a 256 GB M2 MBA, it does pretty good job compared to my 64 GB M1 Max.
It isn’t big deal, get 16 GB RAM, and what ever storage you need.Hey beautiful people,
I was reading an article here the other day stating that the 256 GB MBA will be a bit slower than the 512 GB.
I'm wondering if I upgrade to the 16 GB unified memory, will that compensate for the slower 256 GB? I don't need the 512, so if anyone can chime in I would sincerely appreciate it.
Thank you
With those lots of packages, I guess you wouldn't get a 256 GB SSD in the first place, though? The "a lot of" and "every package" sound like it would consume a lot of space.
Of course, I don't know what sort of projects you're working on but as a game developer, for a dev machine I would these days no longer even look at anything less than 512 GB. More likely I would go for 1 TB or more. Engine, source files, additional tools (to use UE4/5 you need Xcode installed apparently), office stuff, temp files... the 256 would be full in no time.
This is not necessarily big, I would say a project is between 100MB and 1GB. But there is a tremendous amount of files. So read speed does matter as well. Someone who already forgot to deactivate icloud drive on such projects would know what I mean ahah.
If your machine needs more than 8 GB of RAM, then it will use the flash storage for the additional RAM it requires; in this case and only in this case going to 16 GB of RAM would somewhat "compensate" the slower SSD.
macOS will also use memory as file cache which might also improve performance.
The speed difference for the SSDs isn't important for most use cases. Most use cases for regular users will depend much more on random read and random writes which no ones seems to measure.
The M2 MacBook Air 256GB SSD has a sequential write speed of 2260 MB/s when writing 1GB blocks (The Verge)
The M2 MacBook Air 512GB SSD has a sequential write speed of 2760 MB/s when writing 1GB blocks (The Verge)
So writing 1GB of swap will take 0.44 seconds vs 0.36 seconds.
Will you notice when you use Safari?
No.
The M2 MacBook Air 256GB SSD has a sequential write speed of 2260 MB/s when writing 1GB blocks (The Verge)
The M2 MacBook Air 512GB SSD has a sequential write speed of 2760 MB/s when writing 1GB blocks (The Verge)
So writing 1GB of swap will take 0.44 seconds vs 0.36 seconds.
Will you notice when you use Safari?
No.
Yep. I use about 90gb and that’s with Xcode installed.
Vote for 8/512. If you’re light/casual users the likelihood you’re running out of ram is very unlikely, much lower than possibility you’re running out of storage. Light users need storage for photo and docs. You can use iCloud but for some users, fast internet is not available everywhere.
I was wondering this, they are on sale here 10% off, I have 180gb photos/videos but I do use iCloud, am a light user have a 24" 8/512gb iMac as storage, not sure if go the extra $270AUD for the 512gb, faster too I guess.