I'm talking of the components - they're commodity components soldered on to an Apple circuit board. This won't give you any extra performance.
Ah OK, I get what you mean now.
If you look at the SSD benchmarks (albeit not comparative), the Apple PCIe SSDs are much faster in terms of sequential reads and writes than the standard SATA stuff you can buy.
Unless I'm missing something?
(Here are the figures if you guys want to go hunting for benchmarks on third-party parts that might outperform the Mac Pro's):
128KB Sequential Read (QD1)
512GB Samsung PCIe SSD, QD16:
1032.1 MB/s
512GB Samsung PCIe SSD:
985.2 MB/s
128KB Sequential Write (QD1)
512GB Samsung PCIe SSD:
986.8 MB/s
512GB Samsung PCIe SSD, QD16:
971.6 MB/s
4KB Random Read (QD3)
512GB Samsung PCIe SSD, QD16:
94.9 MB/s
512GB Samsung PCIe SSD:
70.7 MB/s
4KB Random Write (8GB LBA Space - QD3) (Interestingly, many of the MacBooks actually outperform the Mac Pro here)
512GB Samsung PCIe SSD:
83.2 MB/s
512GB Samsung PCIe SSD, QD16:
78.8 MB/s
(Note that comparing benchmarks not conducted as part of the same testing regime is not accurate, but it could be indicative at least; another issue is that only the 512GB Mac Pro drive is tested, not the 256GB one.)