MacBook Air with M3 chip has faster SSDs than the M1 model

Apple has released a new MacBook Air with the M3 chip, which has higher performance, Wi-Fi 6E, and support for two external displays.

It turns out that Apple has also solved another problem that plagued the previous generation MacBook Air: SSD performance, as 9to5Mac reports.

The fact is that the base M2 MacBook Air model with 256 GB of storage offered slower SSD speeds than the M1 model. This was due to the fact that the base model used a single 256GB memory chip, not two 128GB chips.

It is also confirmed by Max Tech’s analysis on YouTube that the two 128GB NAND chips in the M3 MacBook Air can process data in parallel, which significantly increases data transfer speeds.

Testing has shown that the M3 MacBook Air can reach a write speed of 2108 MB/s, compared to the speed of the base M2 MacBook Air, which is 1584 MB/s. The read speed of the M2 MacBook Air reached 1576 MB/s, and the M3 MacBook Air reached 2880 MB/s.

This means that the M3 MacBook Air’s SSD write speed is about 33% faster and the read speed is about 82% faster.