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Comment by protomyth | Hacker News Reader

If the SSD is user expandable, then its damn near perfect, but I get the feeling they pointed out the DIMM and not the SSD as replaceable.

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Because of the way the T2 works, storage will never be replaceable/expandable in those Macs.

How so?

Normally an SSD has an on-board flash controller that communicates something like NVME or SATA to the host and a protocol like CFI to the actual NAND chips, it will also map from disk blocks (OS unit of storage) to NAND columns and cells using an internally stored table. These chips do a lot of other mundane things like wear leveling for NAND, clearing written cells, etc. If the T2 is taking the place of this controller and communicating directly with the NAND chips it would be at best duplicative of an external SSD controller and at worst completely incompatible.

Thanks :-)

Alas no, it's basically soldered on. I'd love it with a pair of M.2 NVMe slots, but no such luck!

I'd advise getting the smallest flash drive option then just use an external NVMe drive via Thunderbolt. At least you can upgrade that.

Can you move parts of OS X to external storage?

MacOS used to be very flexible in this regard - you could clone your drive to an external disk and boot off the external disk very easily - but this may have changed with the T2.

Based on the marketing photos on the Apple site it sure looks like the NAND is soldered to the board and not socketed.

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