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32GB iPhone 7 Has 8 Times Slower Storage Performance Than 128GB Model (thenextweb.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Next Web: Apple isn't telling you everything about its phones. Few weeks back, GSMArena reported that the 32GB iPhone 7 and 7 Plus had significantly slower storage performance than the 128GB and 256GB models of the device. In a new video, Unbox Therapy's Lew Hilsenteger conducted a series of speed tests that confirm the discrepancy in storage speeds between the different configurations of Apple's phone -- and it turns out the 32GB iPhone is about eight times slower than the larger capacity storage version of the device. For his first test, Hilsenteger used the free PerformanceTest Mobile app to compare the read and write speeds of the iPhone. While there was little difference between the read speeds of the 32GB and 128GB models, there's a huge disparity when it comes to write speed. The 32GB iPhone writes at 42MB per second, which is nearly eight times slower than the 128GB version's 341MB per second. Hilsenteger then performed a real-world speed test, which included transferring movies from a MacBook to the iPhone using a USB cable. While the 256GB model took two minutes and 34 seconds to complete the 4.2GB file transfer, the 32GB iPhone 7 needed a total of three minutes and 40 seconds for the same transmission.
I'm far from being a storage hardware expert but if mass manufacturing means that it's cheaper to use different number of the same flash chips instead of using the same number of different flash chips, it seems logical that the resulting system would have a bandwidth scaling with the number of chips.
Ezekiel 23:20
On my shelf not three feet away I've got an early prototype of a a logic board for a system later shipped with 2, 4 or 8 flash memory chips back in 2003... a board I owned a good bit of code for. At no point was there any talk of us accessing multiple chips at a time, instead the existing sequential read/write capacity was enough for our needs.
The same goes for any embedded device today, regardless of potential # of memory chips... the manufacturer is only going to parallelize read/write access under two circumstances:
1) no one on the test team noticed them doing so,
2) there is actually a need to do so in order to boost performance... which may not be applicable across all units.
#2 breaks down as it's like putting a hardware raid controller in every PC/server mobo with multiple sata ports. Sure some % of users may end up with multiple HDs attached... why should the manufacturer pay the added cost of baking this extra speed in when it is clearly an add on (or premium upgrade) option?
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
A single NAND die isn't capable of 341MB per second. They're clearly using parallel writes.
- ZFS (...which Apple *STIL* isn't using)
Indeed. *sigh*
Thank goodness for OpenZFS on OS X.