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2018 MacBook Pro: SSD Speed with Large Sustained Transfers
Related: 2015 MacBook Pro, 2017 iMac 5K, 2018 MacBook Pro, 4K and 5K display, iMac, iMac 5K, laptop, MacBook, MacBook Pro, Macs, SSD, Thunderbolt
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Mac wish list • all 15" Apple MacBook Pro 2018 models • MPG gets credit if you buy through those links. Suggested accessories include the OWC Thunderbolt 3 Dock and the Envoy Pro EX Thunderbolt 3 .
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MPG tested a fully-loaded Apple 2018 MacBook Pro 15-inch 2.9 GHz 32GB 2TB Radeon Pro 560X. The only better model is the same configuration with a 4TB SSD.

Sequential transfer speed is the most critical metric for applications that work with large files. It also translates directly to performance elsewhere. However, transfers of smaller sizes can be critically important for some tasks so this is far from the only metric.
Tested with the run-sequential command of diglloydTools DiskTester.
Versus the 2017 iMac 5K, the 2018 MacBook Pro SSD is slightly slower than the 2017 iMac 5K for reads but about 30% faster for writes, a strong improvement.
Compared to the 2017 MacBook Pro and 2016 MacBook Pro, speed is about the same for reads, but writes are about 30% faster.
Speed is on par with the 2017 iMac Pro, which is not only impressive in a laptop but ranks among the best performance ever tested by MPG for a Mac.
These are real world figures through the OS X file system APIs, and thus reflect the performance available to applications.


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