Hacker News Reader

Comment by porphyra | Hacker News Reader

Yeah that is just insane.

I saw some videos from China [1] where people were upgrading the storage in the new M4 Mac Minis. The Mac Mini's SSD is on a removable pcb but it is raw nand flash as opposed to, say, typical m2 2230 SSDs that have a built-in controller. So they had to desolder it. But getting someone in China to desolder and upgrade the SSD to 2 TB is like 90% cheaper than buying it from Apple.

[1] http://xhslink.com/a/o0tLp4thqsDZ

View on HN

Is there really much point though? With thunderbolt 5 external storage seems really viable.

I haven't found any Thunderbolt 5 enclosures for sale yet, though.

Even thunderbolt 4 hubs are few and far between, and mostly dissapointing

The speed difference between doesn't matter for disk speeds though. Absolute top speed is 3 Gbps per chip, so even Thunderbolt 1 should max out 2 chips, with it's 10 Gbps transfer speed. Thunderbolt 4 should max out more than 10 NAND storage chips.

External storage is technically viable, but then it's yet another device and yet another cable contributing to the unholy mess on your desk. If there are no functional reasons to have an external device, it's just better to have an internal one.

There is nothing stopping a third party vendor from making a compatible PCB with a larger NAND flash - since it doesn’t need a controller it could even be cheaper than a classic SSD

Reply on news.ycombinator.com