Detailed tutorial steps you through getting accurate and reproducible benchmarks for your disks. Also further projects and tests you can try.
macOS 11
Now with proper random write and read tests, sophisticated analysis including group medians and linear regression, and detailing reporting.
There’s no more critical app on your Mac, yet Disk Utility has suffered years of neglect – years in which APFS has grown many new features, and all Disk Utility gets is bugs and workaround.
If you try booting into Big Sur in Remote (Internet) Recovery, you’ll get Catalina instead. But nowhere does Apple alert users to this problem.
Can M1 Macs really defy the laws of physics and read files from SSD at around 12 GB/s? Or are their performance improvements more modest?
Using 140 files of sizes 10 KB – 2 GB, the M1 read files significantly faster than a T2 Mac, but the latter wrote files slightly quicker. Highest read rate on the M1 was 10.8 GB/s, which seems almost incredible.
Shipping the M1 Macs has been a milestone, although how you interpret that depends on whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist.
Disk Utility in Big Sur can turn a 1 TB external disk into 4.5 TB or more of imaginary containers. Sadly it’s just a bug, and here’s how to work around it.
A short introduction to some of the highlights and quirks of M1 Macs, from dealing with apps which don’t run properly, to entering Recovery Mode and dealing with disaster.
A new version of Stibium which performs series tests raises further questions about benchmarking SSDs on Intel and M1 Macs. And is an X5 worth the extra cost?
