2021 M1 Pro / Max MacBook Pro Hard Drives

[Grilled Cheese]

With 7.4 GB/s read speeds, these news MacBook Pros are very fast. Does anyone happen to know if the disks are a single NVME volume, or two disks in RAID 0 configuration?

 

[Gnattu]

They are the Apple configuration. If we look at the pictures of the logic board you can see that NAND flash drives are separated on both side of the board, but the nvme controller in embedded in the SoC and exposes a single nvme drive. It is normal to have multiple nand flashes for a single SSD, so technically it is a single nvme drive as we only have one nvme controller in the Soc.(I could be wrong if Apple really install 2 in the M1 Pro/Max, but is seems unlikely.)

 

[Lunfai]

I doubt Apple would ever ship a product with raid 0, my money is that it’s just a singular drive. 7 Gbps isn’t that high when the Samsung 980 Pro reaches up to 7 Gbps anyway

 

[radus]

This is a little bit faster as my SSD 980 Pro inside my 2021 Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga ( 6.9 GB/s ) - that SSD is PCI-E 4.0 and is exchangeable.

 

[Adarna]

Apple has not shipped a MBP with a Hard Disk, with spinning platters, in a decade

 

[Fomalhaut]

Apple has not shipped a MBP with a Hard Disk, with spinning platters, in a decade

I was just thinking the same - the term "hard drive" is really getting old these days....there must already be a whole new generation of computer users who have no idea why it is a "drive" and why it is a "hard"?

Even "solid-state drive" is a bit odd. Presumably, it was called a "drive" because it had rotating machinery inside of it, which an SSD does not. SSD was only coined to provide a reference to HDD (hard disk drive).

And for those who've only used computers in the last 15-20 years, we previously had "floppy" disk drives, made of flexible magnetic disks (3.5 inches in diameter) encased in a plastic outer shell (amusingly called "stiffies" by South Africans) and before that in a (really floppy!) flexible square case (5.25" diameter). There were even larger 8-inch floppies before this....

I think the term "storage" is probably better, but I expect SSD and HDD will be around for many years...

 

[Adarna]

I was just thinking the same - the term "hard drive" is really getting old these days....there must already be a whole new generation of computer users who have no idea why it is a "drive" and why it is a "hard"?

Even "solid-state drive" is a bit odd. Presumably, it was called a "drive" because it had rotating machinery inside of it, which an SSD does not. SSD was only coined to provide a reference to HDD (hard disk drive).

And for those who've only used computers in the last 15-20 years, we previously had "floppy" disk drives, made of flexible magnetic disks (3.5 inches in diameter) encased in a plastic outer shell (amusingly called "stiffies" by South Africans) and before that in a (really floppy!) flexible square case (5.25" diameter). There were even larger 8-inch floppies before this....

I think the term "storage" is probably better, but I expect SSD and HDD will be around for many years...

If I remember my audio engineering correctly they also use "drive" as in "drivers".

A more modern term for HDD would be SSD. Storage could cover SD Express, CF Express, etc.