A New Test Finds the 32GB iPhone 7 Plus Has Slower Storage Speeds

Since different benchmarks often don’t mean much, the site devised another test to compare the handsets:

So we came up with the following test: we shot a 10-minute 4K video with the iPhone, and we then trimmed it exactly in half using the built-in trimming feature of the standard Photos app. We then timed how long it takes the three iPhones to complete the operation of saving the trim as a new file.

It’s a great test as it’s a task you might find yourself occasionally doing and also it involves both reading the original big file (3.3GB) and writing a fairly big new video file.

And boy, what a difference – the 32GB iPhone 7 Plus was three times slower than the 128GB model!

Luckily, I have both a 32GB and 256GB iPhone 7 Plus at my disposal, so I put both through the same benchmarking apps. The 32GB iPhone 7 Plus did indeed seem to score lower on the storage write and read numbers compared to the larger handset.

But then I tried a similar test by trimming a 4K video in half. Both handsets cut a 4-minute video to 2-minutes long in exactly 10 seconds.

So while the benchmarks may be different, I don’t suspect you’ll truly notice any difference in real-world use.