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Ice Dragon

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jun 16, 2009
989
20
I am aware the retina MacBook Pro has 4 PCIe lanes and if I recall correctly the Mac mini only has two right? The reason I ask this is would there be a huge speed difference with reads/writes compared to what is in the Haswell mini if a Broadwell mini was introduced with the same parts as the 13" rMBP?
 
I am aware the retina MacBook Pro has 4 PCIe lanes and if I recall correctly the Mac mini only has two right? The reason I ask this is would there be a huge speed difference with reads/writes compared to what is in the Haswell mini if a Broadwell mini was introduced with the same parts as the 13" rMBP?

That's correct.

The iMac (non-retina and retina) and Mac Mini have only 2 PCIe lanes available to the SSD, because there's an extra two USB ports and Ethernet port that take up the other two PCIe lanes. The rMBP has 4 lanes available because they lack an Ethernet port and an extra two USB ports.

With 2 PCIe lanes, you should get around 700MB/s in reads or writes, while with 4 PCIe lanes, you'd get over 1GB/s in reads or writes, but the real world difference is almost 0.
 
Thanks for that. Yeah so I can just save up for a Haswell mini if they don't release a Broadwell one by say October or November. I highly doubt they're going to radically redesign the thing.
 
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