Macbook Air 2020, M1 Chip 8-core, 1TB SSD

  • We purchased this laptop and tried to find SSD performance.
  • Treat this as our review of Macbook 2020 SSD performance in our environment.
  • Used direct IO and/or sync to avoid cache.
  • Picked the best possible peak numbers and corresponding latencies.
  • We used same workload (jobs/threads) that we published the peak numbers for 1m block size for sustained run
  • Doing benchmark at block level will give the real hardware performance. Unfortunately, we do not have choice to use this drive at block level.
  • Whether an application can fully utilize the bandwidth (The advertised “up to” number) really depends on which block size, read/write ratio, sequential or random access workload, that application is using.
    • We can help identify which storage system is optimal for your application in terms of performance.
  • Comparison with SSD performance of 2019 Macbook Pro (i9/8-core) based:
    • Peak write performance is considerably lower with higher latency in 2020 model (particularly 4k and 8k block sizes). This is surprising for us. Note that there are few differences (CPU, OS, Storage controller) between these 2 models. We suspect it could be due to new storage controller/firmware on 2020 model.
    • Read performance is slightly better in 2020 model (except for 1m block size)
    • Sustained write performance is lot better in 2020 model. Even we updated to 11.5.2 in 2019/i9 model sustained writes are lower in 2019 model. We suspect new SSD controller/firmware in 2020 model made this difference.
    • Attached read, write and sustained comparison charts below
  • Thought it is worth to mention another issue we bumped into, during sustained run. With available space of 875GB we ran into disk full error by following below steps:
    • We kept writing and deleting 500gb data. After sometime we bumped into disk full issue after writing about 200gb though available space reported by OS is 875gb when we started the write.
    • Looks like garbage collection is still in progress due to previous heavy writes. Logic to check available space need to consider this also.
    • It is not clear to us, how long to wait for GC to complete so that we can write 500GB again
  • If you are interested, use with caution as ballpark performance numbers as it could vary depending on multiple factors. We are not liable for any loss or damages caused by using this data