- SSD speeds are nothing short of miraculous in my mind. I come from the old days of striping 16 HDDs together (at a minimum number) to get 1GB/s throughput. Depending on the chassis, that was 2 8-drive enclosures in the "desktop" version or the large 4RU enclosures with redundant PSUs and fans loud enough to overpower arena rock concerts. Now, we can get 5+GB/s throughput from a tiny stick that can be used externally via a single cable for data&power that is absolutely silent. I edit 4K+ video as well, and now can edit directly from the same device the camera recorded to during production. I'm skipping over the parts of still making backups, but there's no more multi-hour copy from source media to edit media during a DIT step. I've spent many a shoot as a DIT wishing the 1s&0s would travel across devices much faster while everyone else on the production has already left, so this is much appreciated by me. Oh, and those 16 device units only came close to 4TB around the time of me finally dropping spinning rust.
The first enclosure I ever dealt with was a 7-bay RAID-0 that could just barely handle AVR75 encoding from Avid. Just barely to the point that only video was saved to the array. The audio throughput would put it over the top, so audio was saved to a separate external drive.
Using SSD feels like a well deserved power up from those days.
by GeekyBear
6 subcomments
- The article speculates on why Apple integrates the SSD controller onto the SOC for their A and M series chips, but misses one big reason, data integrity.
About a decade and a half ago, Apple paid half a billion dollars to acquire the patents of a company making enterprise SSD controllers.
> Anobit appears to be applying a lot of signal processing techniques in addition to ECC to address the issue of NAND reliability and data retention. In its patents there are mentions of periodically refreshing cells whose voltages may have drifted, exploiting some of the behaviors of adjacent cells and generally trying to deal with the things that happen to NAND once it's been worn considerably.
Through all of these efforts, Anobit is promising significant improvements in NAND longevity and reliability.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/5258/apple-acquires-anobit-br...
by Andrew_nenakhov
3 subcomments
- Non upgradeable storage and ram is ridiculous.
Interestingly, when M4 mac mini went on sale, version with 32GB RAM/1TB drive was priced exactly 2x as 16GB RAM / 512GB drive version. This kinda implies that Apple sells only RAM and storage, and gives away the rest for free.
- I bought one during their preorder period. The first SSD started to fail due to overheating. I just received and installed the replacement this week. Fingers crossed that it will be okay.
Important note: the seller provides no warranty for the SSDs. I was fortunate that they offered a 1-year warranty when I bought mine, but that is no longer the case now. $700 is a pretty big risk when there's no warranty.
FWIW, the non-Pro-compatible SSDs were overpriced initially as well, but they came down in price as they became more prevalent. Wait a few months, and we'll probably see the same with Pro-compatible SSDs.
- 700$ for 4TB! Getting robbed in broad daylight and writing a happy blogpost about it
by gandalfian
0 subcomment
- Mothers mac mini 2014? Slow as a dog, 30 second pauses, became unusable. Extremely tricky to reach the 5400rpm hard disc. Found a third party adaptor could bodge an nvme under the easily removable base flap. Suddenly transformed it to a fast nippy useable machine. (She paid up for the 8gb ram originally). But still rather annoyed that Apple essentially crippled their own product and it could only be fixed by chance. Wasn't a cheap pc...
by contingencies
3 subcomments
- While you're at it add the USBC power hack https://github.com/vk2diy/hackbook-m4-mini
I've been traveling for business with this as my sole machine for 3 months straight and it has proven to be an excellent system.
- I did the same a few weeks ago (https://blog.notmyhostna.me/posts/ssd-upgrade-for-mac-mini-m...), usually I’m far into the “just pay for convenience” camp but this was so easy to do and the price difference was just too big.
Saving $500 for 30 min of actual work that’s also easily reversible if needed for a support case is too good to ignore.
- Honestly the external option seems a lot better value for the money for almost all use cases. Something like half the cost. No tinkering with the internals of the very expensive thing. You can move it between computers, upgrade the stick in it, etc.
I'm sure there are cases where you really do care about speeds >3GB/s (and USB-4, the port on the mac, should max out at ~5 which is still marginally lower than the internal one). But I doubt they are common. It's hard to process most data in a meaningful way that fast.
- There are also shops in China that will upgrade the SSD in a mac mini for cheaper and they will do all the work of the DFU restore etc.
- I was quite pleased with the iBoff 2TB SSD I got for my M4 Mini. It's sad how badly Apple has some of us conditioned with the pathetic amounts of storage they include. I haven't had a Mac with more than 512GB of storage, basically, ever? And recently I was on my Mini, digging through some old backups, and hesitated as I normally would downloading a 40GB zip from my NAS, because "oh geeze this is 40GB plus another 40 after decompression, do I have enough space?" because 80GB is normally 15% of my Mac's storage space. Then I remembered, oh yeah, heaps of storage, this'll only cost me 4% of the total. I bought this Mac with the 256GB base SSD knowing I could upgrade, and nearly 40% of the drive was taken up out of the box.
It's pure robbery on Apple's part. Completely beyond the pale now. Their ridiculous RAM and storage prices were never that big of a deal back in the PowerBook/early Macbook Pro days, because you could always opt out if you were a tiny bit handy with a small screwdriver (my 2008 unibody lets me swap storage with *1* screw, swap a battery with zero!). Now? It's unforgivable. I don't care about soldered RAM, I get it, but it is despicable charging as much as the entire computer to upgrade the RAM a paltry 16GB.
There's profit, and there's actively making your entire product experience worse in pursuit of profit. Having to constantly hem and haw over oh god oh geeze do I have enough local storage for this basic task, having to juggle external storage and copying files back and forth (since plenty of their own shit doesn't work if its installed on an external SSD), or constantly deleting and redownloading larger apps, makes the product experience worse. Full stop. At the very least every Mac they sell should have 512GB, if not a TB, stock. I'm tired of acting like SSDs are some insanely expensive luxury like it's 2008 again.
- $1200 for 4TB upgrade is so ridiculous. Manufacturers holding RAM for ransom is very annoying. Esp when the lowest setting isn't even meant to be purchased, and the specs are so low they will underperform, or be obsolete in a few years.
This is kind of why people start cloning macs in the 90s. They were too expensive straight from the factory.
- The people behind the "kingsener" YT channel have been doing these types of upgrades for a long time.
He recently posted an upgrade of this same process as a short - https://m.youtube.com/shorts/b-Z5GhYhbjM
It’s wild to see how much Apple invests in making these as hostile to the user to upgrade. But also cool to see people out there with the skills to desolder the chips, memory, and storage and replace with a much faster alternative.
If Apple truly cared about their carbon footprint, devices would be easily serviceable and upgradeable by user
- Ones you can replace the storage with a screwdriver are a safe risk, the soldering upgrades are a void warranty and something you are always best getting somebody who can do it in their sleep to do for you. Soldering is not as easy as it used to be, even the pros will not have 100% success and need to reflow or rework.
by bee_rider
1 subcomments
- Tangential, just based on a funny coincidence noticeable in the article: What do all these M’s stand for, anyway? I guess the M.2 might be inherited from the m in mSATA and mPCIe(?).
For Apple… they had A for for their cellphone chips, which vaguely made sense because they were the only chips Apple made at the time. But then, M for their laptop chips? M as in… mobile, or mini? But they use it in their Macs Pro, including their workstation-y ones…
by ProllyInfamous
0 subcomment
- I made a 16TB external SSD RAID0 using four 4tb SATA drives and a Terramaster external enclosure... for less than $700 [1]
Not as fast as a single nVME in external Acadis enclosure... but it is fast.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/TERRAMASTER-D4-320-External-Drive-Enc... [sold out]
by gigatexal
6 subcomments
- Not worth the hassle and the faffing. Just pay Apple their tax. Your time is far more valuable. And if it’s not then you have bigger fish to fry.
by userbinator
0 subcomment
- I was provided the $699 M4 Pro 4TB SSD upgrade by M4-SSD. It's quite expensive (especially compared to normal 4TB NVMe SSDs, which range from $200-400)
Depends what type of flash that's comparing. QLC is cheap, TLC a bit more expensive, MLC nearly unobtainable, and SLC insanely expensive unless you SLC-mod a QLC drive.
by zwilliamson
0 subcomment
- Or just go with a Beelink SER8 and toss Arch Linux + Wayland on it. you’ll save thousands of dollars and have a better user interface that’s way more customizable and efficient.
- Comparing the speeds of a new flash device and an old, used one will typically not be valid unless steps are taken to condition the new device into a steady operating state.
by 999900000999
0 subcomment
- Weird product.
For the desktops you can always just plug in an external drive.
That said, SSDs eventually have to go bad.
This is probably more important as a RTR( right to repair ) issue.
by justinator
2 subcomments
- Are there any suggestions on upgrading the storage of an M1 Macbook Pro? Even with the 1T version, I'm feeling the pinch.
- I’m surprised and happy that this is possible.
by throwawayffffas
0 subcomment
- > It's still more expensive than a normal nvme, but not by too much.
It's double the price, double is too much.
- nicely done
by tonetheman
0 subcomment
- [dead]
- So you pay $700 for an SSD that otherwise retails for $200 and then do an "unauthorized" modification of your own computer and void the warranty to install it, but that's still preferable because it otherwise costs $1200 directly from Apple. The Apple tax is really something else.
- I completely quit buying Apple devices all togehter, but I still occasionally check their website. The SSD upgrade prices are ridiculous and funny, especially since I keep meeting people that are convinced that Apples SSDs are somehow magically better than my 60 EUR Samsung M.2 and the price is hence justified.
The upgrade prices
- 13" MacBook Air: 256GB to 512GB -> 256GB for 250 EUR
- 14" MacBook Pro: 512GB to 1TB -> 512GB for 250 EUR
So the Air upgrade is twice the price for what is - as far as I was able to figure out - the same hardware?
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