Using a gaming part is a poor comparison because gaming parts get higher speeds at lower prices by sacrificing longevity/energy efficiency. Clearly not the tradeoff Apple wants to make here.
Which isn’t anything against the SN850x, it’s a great fit for the intended use case it’s just many people assume there’s zero trade-offs involved beyond speed/price/capacity.
Apple is definitely raising storage prices to milk their customers and promote their iCloud cash cow, but it’s still worth considering when looking at ‘gaming’ parts in different situations.
It's a fair comparison. Both Apple's computers and drives like the WD SN850x are using commodity SSD-grade TLC flash; there's no significant difference in quality, performance, efficiency, or durability in the flash itself. It's possible (maybe even likely) that a Mac with 2TB of built-in storage is using literally the same NAND flash dies that show up in a SN850x.
SSD performance and power efficiency are significantly affected by the choice of controller. Apple's Macs have the controller built-in to the SoC, so it's a sunk cost that doesn't really factor in to upgrade pricing.
I said poor not unfair. They might happen to end up with equal price per flash chip, but either could end up being more expensive it’s just not a good yardstick IMO.
Anyway, what you might consider insignificant differences are things companies do consider these worth paying for. You not caring isn’t the same thing as nobody caring.
> significantly affected by the choice of controller
Aka it is more complicated than just slapping different controller on the same chips and calling it a day.
The SN850x isn't a "gaming part", it's a top-of-the-line consumer SSD that uses the exact same type of NAND chips (3D TLC) that Apple uses in its products.
Crush load times and slash throttling, lagging, and texture pop-ins with the WD_BLACK SN850X NVMe™ SSD. …
Do more with WD_BLACK Dashboard
The downloadable WD_BLACK Dashboard (Windows® only) monitors your drive’s health, lets you customize your RGB lighting, and, exclusively on the SN850X SSD, enables Game Mode 2.0 to transform your gaming experience.”
> There’s a lot of diversity under that “3D TLC” umbrella.
There really isn't. Apple is reported to use SanDisk 3D TLC NAND chips. SanDisk is owned by Western Digital, and the WD SSDs use SanDisk chips. They're literally the same chips.
I’ve said several times they could be using worse components.
The why I’m still talking is because people seem to think buying a gaming SSD is a good idea when they also want longevity / low risk of future. The parts can last 10+ years but they’re designed with something else in mind.
There really isn't much diversity in NAND flash product lines. Each generation of 3D NAND from WD+Kioxia basically consists of two sizes of TLC die and one or two sizes of QLC die. For the purposes of this conversation, binning doesn't matter because "SSD grade" is already the top bin. So the only variable on the NAND side for a high-end 2TB drive is the question of whether it's built with the high-capacity die (cheaper per GB), or twice as many of the low-capacity dies (potentially faster if it allows more controller channels to be fully populated, but that's usually not a problem at 2TB).
I’m not sure what you mean by SSD grade, Grade A to D chips aren’t strictly about binning but also traceability/fraud.
One hardware guy mentioned internal defects can cause differences is the amount of reserve sectors that a final product ends up with. That’s exactly the kind of arbitrary cutoff that lets companies charge different prices for the same part.
Lower-grade flash with higher initial defect rates is what gets used in USB flash drives and SD cards, and some bargain-bin SSDs with lower usable capacities (ie. 960GB rather than 1TB).
The stuff used in a WD Black or WD Blue branded consumer SSD is not a different quality grade from the stuff used in any other mainstream consumer SSD, Apple's included.
At what grade? Plus, how much extra endurance is baked in to Apple's drives, i.e. how over-provisioned are they?
My MacBook Air M1 reports 99% health after being daily driven (and some 26TB written to it) at work since 2020 (we got these as soon as they introduced), and I don't baby its drive in any way.
Any decent consumer SSD will be exactly the same, brands such as SK Hynix, Samsung, Crucial, WD, etc. same chips and same performance, much cheaper than the Apple tax.
I'll respectfully disagree on the performance front.
Any flash storage has two main components: A controller and a set of flash chips, and a third component enters to the picture when connecting these two: number & nature of channels.
Starting from the controller (and channels), beside the obvious PCIe generation, there are some other factors. DRAM support, NAND support (not all NAND is the same!), number of channels, and the speed of these channels. A DRAMless SSD will suffer after its "pseudo-SLC" cache runs out, and the performance of the drive will generally suffer if the number of channels can't absorb the traffic coming from the PCIe side. Here, to have a top notch SSD, you need to have a good/fast controller with DRAM support, and enough channels with enough speed to absorb all traffic requests, so you can get use of the premium NAND chips you bought.
Next, we have the flash layout. Flash chips vary in speed, density and drive. A high density flash chip might be slower, or a flash chip might require higher drive, resulting in higher temperatures in general. In some cases, instead of populating all channels, a manufacturer might decide to populate a few channels and leave the rest unpopulated, creating a big but slower SSD.
Beyond that, there are other considerations like over-provisioning at flash level, "soft SLC cache" size, wear leveling capabilities under sustained load, etc. etc.
For example, an enterprise SSD comes with the "same" TLC chips, but over-provisioned 5:1 or 10:1 (10TB flash for 1TB capacity)
Now, let's see some real-world examples:
- Kingston NV2, NV3: A budget SSD with great capacity and price. DRAMless, no channel number guarantee, and might come in with TLC or QLC chips. Burst speeds are OK, will make 90% of the people happy, but slows down in long transfers and under heavy load. Runs cooking hot in both controller and flash side.
- Kingston KC3000: A higher end drive with part/channel guarantees, handles sustained load better, runs way cooler, ironically.
- Samsung 980/990 Pro: Samsung's higher end drive. Runs cool, sustains speed all over due to DRAM and tons of channels and vertical integration of controller + NAND.
- Samsung T7 Shield: Looks like an bulky 1.8" drive, but it's selling point is it can sustain 1050MB/s writes wihtout even slowing down until it's full. Never gets warm.
So, flash drives comes in all shapes and sizes and with specifications and capabilities all over the place. A WD Blue and WD Black won't perform the same. Same for Sandisk's Plus, Extreme, Extreme Pro series.
This is why OWC was/is the go-to 3rd party SSD provier for Macs for quite some time. They tune their drives similar to Apple's and very similar to what OS expects as behavior. It's not slap some controllers and flash chips on a PCB, change three fields in a firmware and sell.
Flash storage is black magic at this point, and thinking every box is the same is a big mistake.
This comment can be easily 3x longer, but I want to keep it readable.
Western Digital themselves are literally calling the WD_BLACK line their gaming line[1], and their page for the SN850X in particular is dripping with "gaming"[2].
Maybe that doesn't make it a bad comparison, but the SN850X is def intended to be a gaming part.
What is a competing part that you think would be more comparable?
Gamers are the ones buying expensive parts so it makes sense to market to that. The next tier after this is basically server-class 10-20k machines which Apple is definitely not competing with (and SSDs are not really that much better in that class anyway). Dismissing SSDs as “gaming” parts as if it’s diminishing the quality misunderstands what’s happening here. It would be one thing if WD was ignoring fsyncs to achieve this performance but gamers don’t care about writes so much anyway and there’s no indication WD did that.
Source: I have the WD and Samsung parts as well as cheapo random SSDs.
The other product lines would be WD Blues (marketed at "creative professionals working with large files") and WD Reds (marketed specifically for use in NAS's), but neither of these really support the argument that the SN850x isn't a good comparison, because both the Blue and Red lines are cheaper and less performant (and the Blues are even rated for less longevity), and just make it seem like Apple is price gouging even more.
The point I was trying to make by pointing out that the SN850x isn't a "gaming part" is that the SN850x is literally the top-of-the-line, most expensive consumer SSD sold by WD, and has practically the same specs as other top-of-the-line, most expensive competing parts like the Samsung 990 Pro. Being one of the most expensive SSDs on the market means that saying that the SN850x is a bad comparison because it's supposedly "lower price" is just false on its face.
Ahh you misunderstood what the lower prices is in reference to. Gaming parts often have a real premium, it’s specifically the price at a specific performance level where they preform well.
To be more clear, getting equal performance without sacrificing anything would raise costs even further.
I personally don’t think anything is a great comparison.
It’s easy to say moderate premium over normal business grade SSD’s but that doesn’t mean any specific number is correct. I’d say the equivalent to a 130$ to 220$ SSD assuming a stand alone equivalent exited, but the actual number depending on info Apple isn’t sharing. And yes the range is both above and below the specific part suggested.
Is it clear? Apple doesn't publish endurance specs for their drives so there's actually no way to tell. 600x full drive writes (what the 2TB SN850X is specced for) is probably enough for the vast majority of users to never have to worry about it. You can even get enterprise SSDs, which are rated in whole drive writes per day for less than that.
Samsung 990 is marketed as a PRO part and a reasonable comparison, hell it’s likely a better product than what Apple is shipping. But when a company slaps gaming 30 times on the product page, lists specific features to minimize load times etc it’s clearly targeting a specific demographic who in general wants different tradeoffs.
At scale failures are more than just endurance ratings. Gaming laptops for example often cook their components due to prioritizing performance over long term stability. That doesn’t guarantee early failure, but it reduces the likelihood the system is working in 4 years.
I've been running a Crucial MX100 256 GB SSD for 10 years. It's at 63% health from a S.M.A.R.T. readout. It's been powered on 125 times over ~10 years and transferred 56 TB in that time. It's my main Windows partition and runs WSL 2 where I've built and ran thousands of Docker images. Basically, it hasn't been sitting here unused.
Which isn’t anything against the SN850x, it’s a great fit for the intended use case it’s just many people assume there’s zero trade-offs involved beyond speed/price/capacity.
Apple is definitely raising storage prices to milk their customers and promote their iCloud cash cow, but it’s still worth considering when looking at ‘gaming’ parts in different situations.