SSD speed impact from M3 to M5?

[zqbobs]

I believe the MacBook Air and Pro system internal SSD on the M5 is about 2X faster for R/W than previous models. Does anyone have direct experience with that for certain apps and use cases? I do a lot of photo work and some Handbrake video conversion, and have recently been taking advantage of the 1TB internal on my M3 Air by copying large folders back and forth to it from external SSDs or HDDs. So, I’m wondering if the move to an M5 would make a noticeable difference. Since the Air has only TB3 or 4 connections, that would be a limiting factor, I would think, on transfers. But once files are on the internal, I would also think that tasks such as face recognition, pattern searching, color sorting, etc might be considerably faster on the M5 because of its higher SSD and processor speeds. Any comments or experience?

 

[bzgnyc2]

I believe the MacBook Air and Pro system internal SSD on the M5 is about 2X faster for R/W than previous models. Does anyone have direct experience with that for certain apps and use cases? I do a lot of photo work and some Handbrake video conversion

Handbrake is unlikely to be accelerated by the faster speed of the SSD in the M5 models (i.e. the SSD is probably not the bottleneck). Even if your input is uncompressed 4K video and the Mac's hardware encoder is converting at 100fps, an SSD connected over TB4 probably wouldn't be the bottleneck.

, and have recently been taking advantage of the 1TB internal on my M3 Air by copying large folders back and forth to it from external SSDs or HDDs. So, I’m wondering if the move to an M5 would make a noticeable difference.

Any I/O going to or from an HDD is unlikely to be accelerated by an M5.

Copying large folders back and forth between a TB5 SSD and the internal SSD on an M5 will likely be noticeably faster.

Since the Air has only TB3 or 4 connections, that would be a limiting factor, I would think, on transfers. But once files are on the internal, I would also think that tasks such as face recognition, pattern searching, color sorting, etc might be considerably faster on the M5 because of its higher SSD and processor speeds. Any comments or experience?

The M5 will be significantly faster than the M3 for CPU-bound things and quite a bit faster for AI workloads that have been optimized for it. Not sure the SSD will be a factor in any of this -- most AI workloads aren't I/O-bound.

You might get more help if you name your exact applications and the size of the files/data/etc (e.g. resolution, fps, etc) you are working with

In the meantime, you can get a sense of your current bottlenecks from what you see in Activity Monitor when you run your current applications on your current system. Under CPU, you can look at whether your applications are using 100% CPU or 100% GPU and/or all the processors. Likewise, under Disk you can see the system read/write/sec. If generally under 3GB/sec, a faster internal SSD is unlikely to be make a difference.

 

[benholt]

On my M3 Max I move multi-GB ProRes and proxy caches around all day, and the internal SSD basically never becomes the bottleneck — it's whatever external is on the other side of the transfer. TB4 caps around 3.0–3.2 GB/s real-world, and a solid bus-powered NVMe enclosure sits closer to 1.5–2.0 GB/s. So the M5's faster internal helps if you're doing a lot of internal-to-internal work in Finder, but with an external on either end of the copy, that speed cap won't matter.

Handbrake I agree with bzgnyc2 — the hardware encoder is the bottleneck long before storage. Face recognition and pattern search in Photos are CPU + Neural Engine bound once the files are in memory, not disk-bound. For the workflow you're describing, the M3 → M5 chip generation itself is what'll move the needle more than the SSD spec.