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OWC Unboxes, Tests SSD Speeds of New 13″ and 15″ Retina MacBook Pros

Earlier today, Apple unveiled its latest refresh to its Mac lineup, this time focusing on the MacBook Pro with Retina display. Both the 13” and 15” models received a faster Intel Haswell processor and higher standard memory configurations.

UPDATE: OWC Now Offers SSD Upgrades for 2013-Current MacBook Air & MacBook Pro with Retina display models and OWC Reveals Apple Boot Camp Support for SSDs

We were able to get our hands on a 15” and 13” model and run some SSD benchmarking.

15” MacBook Pro with Retina display mid-2014 SSD Performance:

mbpr_15_2014_ssd

mbpr_15_2014_ssd_lrg

mbpr_15_2014_ssd_ext

 

13” MacBook Pro with Retina display mid-2014 SSD Performance:mbpr_13_2014_ssd

mbpr_13_2014_ssd_lrg

mbpr_13_2014_ssd_ext

 

We also took some photos of our unboxing and teardowns for your viewing pleasure below. And check out our post from earlier today for more information on the rMBP refresh and to see OWC’s upgrades for the rMBP lineup.

13″ MacBook Pro with Retina display unboxing/teardown: 

[nggallery id=74]

15″ MacBook Pro with Retina display unboxing/teardown:

[nggallery id=75]

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26 Comments

  • Is there any ssd upgrades available for my mid 2014 macbook pro 13.3 retina with 256 GB SSD and 8GB ram?

  • Please, when you publish the data would be the case that you used the software to detect them normally reperbile to users.

    For this test you have chosen QuickBench which is a paid program.
    Instead, the user normally and free download Apple Blackmagic Disk Speed ​​Test to measure the performance of its HD or SSD.

    At a minimum use both … or a published indicative comparison between the two.

    Thanks for your attention that you will want to give this suggestion.

  • Any update on a PCIe SSD upgrade for the late 2013 and new Haswell rMBP’s?

    • While we love all Macs, we didn’t get a 1TB. We’ll have to wait for some of the review sites like Macworld to see how a 1TB one performs. Though since these latest MacBook Pro upgrades focus mainly on the processor and upping the amount of default memory you should expect similar performance numbers from the 1TB SSD upgrade that was in the 2013. For the 2013 models other sites we’re reporting speeds up to 930MB/s for the 1TB in the 15″ models.

  • Do you have extended test statistics? Obviously transferring just a few KB is going to be slower than 100 MB.

    • Sorry about that. The initial post didn’t have the extended test. We followed up the next morning by adding the extended SSD tests in there. So they’re up now. Thanks for catching us on that, and for reading.

  • I’m curious. If these two SSD cards have compatible interface, how it will perform if you swap these cards? Does the SSD card itself perform differently? or the difference of the interfaces on motherboards?

    • The SSDs / Flash storage cards are indeed swappable among compatible MacBook Pros. The MacBook Pros switched to a PCIe connections for the flash storage with the 2013 models. So among the PCIe based 2013 and 2014 MacBook Pros you can swap the SSDs around (of course using proper installation methods). There is indeed a performance difference among the drives that’s independent of the machine it’s installed in. So the numbers you see in the performance tests would be very similar, if not exactly the same, if we took the Sandisk out of the 2014 MacBook Pro 13″ and installed it into the 15″ or took the Samsung out of the 15″ and installed it into the 13″. In the end, they’re both really fast with 700MB/s or higher read times, while among the two drives tested, the Sandisk does have slower write times than the Samsung. Thanks for reading and for your comment.