2018 15" MacBook Pro SSD Benchmark - macOS, Bootcamp and Windows on VMWare Fusion

Hardware:

• 2018 15 inch MacBook Pro, 2.6 GHz Intel Core i7,  Radeon 560X, 16 GB DDR4 RAM, 512 GB SSD

Software:

• macOS High Sierra 10.13.6 (with July update addressing throttling issue), APFS + encryption
• Bootcamp, Windows 10 Pro x64 Fall Creators Update, NTFS
• VMWare Fusion 10.1.1, Windows 10 Pro x86 guest OS, NTFS

Tests

To test SSD read/write speeds on various platforms in a consistent way I've used a self-cooked cross-platform .NET Core app. As it turned out, finding one on the internet (for Windows and Mac) wasn't that easy. Plus with the app I'm pretty sure OS file cache is not intervening and the metrics are clear (RAM <-> Disk transfer speeds). Please find the results below:

Test	macOS	Windows - Bootcamp	Windows - VM
Sequential write	2499 MB/s	938 MB/s	949 MB/s
Sequential read	1824 MB/s	1141 MB/s	2592 MB/s*
Random write (4KB)	147 MB/s	6 MB/s	24 MB/s
Random read (4KB)	39 MB/s	9 MB/s	35 MB/s

*Caching on the side of VMWare is suspected.

1. Windows Bootcamp is almost twice slower in sequential speeds and many times slower in random ones.
2. Surprisingly, Windows under VMWare fusion showed much better results than bootcamp.
3. Developing for Windows on MacBook might be faster in VM, rather than under Bootcamp!

Additionally I tested copying 20 GB of large files from macOS's APFS volume to Bootcamp volume (with Tuxera NTFS driver) and observed transfer speed staying between 550 and 600 MB/s.

Bonus Tests: CPU, GPU and Memory

Test	macOS	Windows - Bootcamp	Windows - VM
Geekbench 4 (single core)	5255	5082
Geekbench 4 (multi-core)	22228	22245
Geekbench 4 (OpenCL/GPU)	64130	58425
Memory copy*	7371 MB/s	10953 MB/s	2255 MB/s

*Memory copy - how fast a big chunk of data stored in RAM can be copied to another location in RAM using standard .NET Core API