PCIe vs NVMe

[Dave410]

Hi All,

I've been a PC guy since 1984, but I'm planning to switch to Mac later this fall or perhaps next spring, depending on when the MBP is updated with Skylake, and I'm trying to figure out Apple specs. Perhaps you can help.

As you know, the current MacBook Pro uses "PCIe-based Flash Storage" whereas the new MacBook uses the new NVMe standard to access the SSD. NVMe is much faster, or so they say. Does anybody have any numbers to show how much faster? And how fast is data transfer for the current PCIe standard in Macs?

For example, my seven-year-old homebuilt PC uses AHCI to access the SSDs and it tops out about 500 MBps due to the AHCI bottleneck. The SSD is much faster than that, but the AHCI interface holds it back. NVMe is coming online in the PC world now and I've read it will transfer data at 2 GBps which is faster than the SSD and removes the bottleneck. Way cool! I'm confident PCIe in the Mac is faster than AHCI in my PC, but how much faster? Any numbers? And how fast will NVMe be when it reaches the MacBook Pro?

Many thanks in advance for any information or explanations.

Cheers,
Dave

 

[Youngesttim]

Don't know anything about NVMe, will have to read up about it. I know that the new mid-2015 rMBP 15' 2.5 GHz quad core with 512GB ssd is blazing fast...

Hi All,

I've been a PC guy since 1984, but I'm planning to switch to Mac later this fall or perhaps next spring, depending on when the MBP is updated with Skylake, and I'm trying to figure out Apple specs. Perhaps you can help.

As you know, the current MacBook Pro uses "PCIe-based Flash Storage" whereas the new MacBook uses the new NVMe standard to access the SSD. NVMe is much faster, or so they say. Does anybody have any numbers to show how much faster? And how fast is data transfer for the current PCIe standard in Macs?

For example, my seven-year-old homebuilt PC uses AHCI to access the SSDs and it tops out about 500 MBps due to the AHCI bottleneck. The SSD is much faster than that, but the AHCI interface holds it back. NVMe is coming online in the PC world now and I've read it will transfer data at 2 GBps which is faster than the SSD and removes the bottleneck. Way cool! I'm confident PCIe in the Mac is faster than AHCI in my PC, but how much faster? Any numbers? And how fast will NVMe be when it reaches the MacBook Pro?

Many thanks in advance for any information or explanations.

Cheers,
Dave

 

[Dave410]

Many thanks. That's faster than I would have guessed. It looks like you've pegged your meters too, so I wonder how fast it really is. Cheers.

 

[Youngesttim]

You're very welcome, I'm sure others will chime in...

My first computer, back in 1991 - a PC - had a 30MB hard drive... ;=)

 

[T5BRICK]

Many thanks. That's faster than I would have guessed. It looks like you've pegged your meters too, so I wonder how fast it really is. Cheers.

The raw numbers are correct. If I recall correctly, the needles "peg" around 600 MB/s.

The flash drives in the rMB are slower than the PCIe units in the rMBP.

 

[Dave410]

The raw numbers are correct. If I recall correctly, the needles "peg" around 600 MB/s.

Good to know. That's about three times faster than AHCI then. Thanks.


The flash drives in the rMB are slower than the PCIe units in the rMBP.

Not so sure about that. The MacBook using NVMe would be about 30% faster than the numbers Youngesttim provided for PCIe. Anandtech had an article about NVMe in the MacBook recently and they were really excited with how fast it was. Cheers.

 

[ilikewhey]

NVMe is miles ahead than the current ahci ssd in macs, my intel 750 gets around 400k in IOPS while my mac only gets around 100k in IOPS,