Is the storage speed difference really 3x the Mac Pro?

[basehead617]

Looking at MKB's video - the flash storage in the Mac Studio is showing read/write speeds of 6 gb/sec, which is about 2.5-3x what the Mac Pro flash storage is..

Is that really accurate?!

What is the technical difference between the storage types?

 

[roland.g]

Each generation of SSD and now with faster M.2 NVMe storage, the SSDs AFAIK are faster or the way the CPU and motherboard interfaces with the storage has gotten faster or a combination. A few years ago it was a big deal for a MBP to have 450MB/s speeds. The new Studios are 7.4GB/s. The M1 Mini is not that fast. It is not surprising that the Mac Pro which doesn't benefit from any of the SoC architecture of the Apple Silicon and has not been updated as recently doesn't boast the same sort of speeds as the newest Studio. I would have to check the specs but I would hazard that last year's MBP is not that fast either.

 

[Patchwork]

Given the speeds I’m guessing the Studio is using PCIe 4.0 SSDs as these hit over 7GB/s. The Sony PS5 uses gen 4 SSDs and pretty much hits the same speed, so pretty common. What is surprising is that the Mac Pro hasn’t been updated to faster SSDs as the kind of use it is put, there would definitely be benefits. I’m think though that would involve a new motherboard, so probably not cost effective with Apple moving to their own chips.

 

[jasoncarle]

As others have stated, it's the difference between gen 3 PCIe and gen 4. My gen 4 PCIe M.2 drives in my Ubuntu machine can regularly hit 7GB/s as well.