Will a MacBook with less storage space have less performance advantages than those one with more storage?
Solution 1:
There are some slight disadvantages of a smaller drive.
The time to restore from backup will not change depending on the drive's size, only on the quantity of data stored on it, subject to 2. below.
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Smaller drives get full more easily [obviously] & you can't upgrade the drive on a modern Mac, so you'd have to use an external.
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Full drives are slower to read/write. This is mainly to do with how drives erase & re-use sectors after they are 'empty'. The system periodically cleans up unused sectors using a method known as TRIM. A sector marked as 'trimmed' can be written to immediately. A sector which hasn't yet been 'trimmed' first needs to be erased. This is quite a bit slower.
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Smaller drives wear out more quickly as they have less ability to spread out their writes to unused portions of the drive.
If you have limited RAM, then virtual memory is subject to both factors 1 & 2, as it needs to be able to read & write to the drive frequently.