Chosen Solution
Which drive is better?
I would say it’s more an issue of what you can get in the size you want and the cost. Apple’s custom Samsung SSPOLARIS drives are expensive and hard to find (often used), $760 for the 2TB. Whereas the OWC Aura Pro x2 is only $470 for the 2TB. Update (09/10/2021) @ohvtbear - Speed is not always easy to define as the given system the drive is used in also becomes a factor. Apple has used different flavors of their PCIe interface, as over time better solutions have been used. Here’s a good read The Ultimate Guide to Apple’s Proprietary SSDs and here’s a good graphic for reference:
Both 13” & 15” MacBook Pro’s offer PCIe 3.0 (four lanes) and support NVMe 1.3 Samsung OEM drives: Apples Samsung SSD’s came with either of these controllers: SSUBX Flash controllerPOLARIS Flash controllerPHOENIX Flash controller So lets first look at the Sequential Read performance of 960 Pro and PM981 1 TB drives which are comparable to Apples POLARIS (960 Pro) and the last drive Apple used PHOENIX (PM981)
Now sustained read/write
As we can see there is very little performance difference! As the M.2 system used for the test hit its limits of the I/O and processing. We have also seen this same effect within the SATA III (6.0) interface as well there the I/O channel was the limit. The PCI interface limit is the number of lanes and the clocking of the channel which gets into the limits of PCI 4.0 vs the coming PCI 5.0 spec. So what about OWC’s SSD drives? Sadly, AnandTech updated its test suite so we can’t make a clean comparison. Here’s the graphs which I think is a good measure even as we are working off of different hardware within this test suite as well.
So clearly the Samsung SSD’s are the better but this is not a fair comparison! As we are using different systems and OS’s. I have not seen a true comparison between even Apple’s SSD’s alone so its hard to prove or disprove the performance difference. Then we still have what do we really need to factor in! Do you drive a Maserati race car to work, or do you drive a Jeep all terrain SUV? Clearly there is a huge price difference and the racer is not designed for stop and go city driving or going through the mountain passes to your home! So you buy the proper vehicle for its use, and you don’t over buy or get pulled into the bling aspect do you! So is getting the more expensive custom Samsung SSD the better (don’t forget these are often used drives). Or going with the OWC SSD. References: AnandTech - Samsung PM981 M.2 SSDAnandTech - OWC Aura Pro x2 SSD
