Comment by vbezhenar
4 years ago
It's still not clear why Apple SSD so slow. Surely there's more to it. May be other SSDs are cheating in firmware? Or may be it's just bug in Apple firmware? I'm really interested if there will be follow ups on Apple side.
Since this design is inherited from iDevices, my guess is they never bothered to optimize this command since software on a battery-powered device would almost never need to issue it. It should be something they can improve in firmware.
From my understanding, the thing that’s slow is writing data to “permanent storage” (aka the layer under all the caching).
Some storage tech is just slow at that, and manufacturers muddy the water by rating some (SSDs|Micro SDs|whatever) in GB/s overall when much of those big numbers are a combination of caches and trickery.
I would not be surprised if Apple is using a tech that just has slow write speeds in trade for fast read speeds since most Apple users will be happy with faster read speeds.
Maybe it allow to design a device with less power consumption.