That's why external SSDs are so common in Mac setups, even accounting for the additional cost of a Thunderbolt enclosure it's usually still significantly cheaper than getting a bigger internal SSD from Apple.
(Not sure if Apple SSDs have power-loss protection. Not using sockets probably eliminates one source of accidental power loss.)
Samsung is a much better example of a manufacturer that Apple would be emulating, investing in their own controllers, etc, and certainly not leaving out security features with no plan.
Intel leaving the SSD market probably has more relation to Apple than WD or Samsung.
I'm not asserting that Apple succeeds in making high quality, I'm saying their hardware trust makes them uncompetitive with the entire PC market where some brands will deliver high enough quality and all brands have access to low quality dumping to reach scale, etc.
Ok, I think your first mistake here is assuming that retail SSDs are a priority for Samsung. What they actually care about are the SSDs they sell to PC OEMs, and the enterprise SSDs. They don't really need the retail product line to serve as some kind of experimental dumping grounds. The low-end models that make it to the retail product line exist because they already have similar models in mass production for PC OEMs, and they can make a retail version by changing from green solder mask to black solder mask and printing a new sticker. (The high-end retail models exist for much the same reason, but sometimes have more meaningful hardware differences because PC OEMs aren't so obsessive about maximizing scores on bad benchmarks.)
I don't really understand how everyone on this thread can explain the nuances that should be what is interesting while claiming everything is the same.
Either technology/politics has changed and organizational structures we claimed in the 1980s to be both unethical and inefficient are now only unethical, or they have not changed and we are in the same cycle with these organizations as before but somehow elongated..
But no, what is interesting to HN is that there's a lot of fine detail in the physical market, but somehow when searching for any interpretation, a widget is a widget and Apple is WD and nothing interesting will ever happen again.
I bought a 4xM.2 card and 4x2TB Samsung Pro SSDs, cost me $1,300, I got to keep the 1TB "system" SSD, and was faster, at 6.8GBps versus the system drive at 5.5.
Similar with memory. OWC literally sells the same memory as Apple (same manufacturer, same specifications. Apple also wanted $3,000 for 160GB of memory (going from 32 to 192). I paid $1,000.
But at least the tech press wrote a bit about it, for example here[1], including a link on how Samsung implements it using journaling on consumer SSDs. I would expect WD to do something similar given that multiple WD drives passed the test.
[1]: https://hothardware.com/news/heads-up-nvme-ssds-lose-data-po...
Which isn’t anything against the SN850x, it’s a great fit for the intended use case it’s just many people assume there’s zero trade-offs involved beyond speed/price/capacity.
Apple is definitely raising storage prices to milk their customers and promote their iCloud cash cow, but it’s still worth considering when looking at ‘gaming’ parts in different situations.
Apple is overcharging for storage. You get a lot of compute for cheap though :/
SSD performance and power efficiency are significantly affected by the choice of controller. Apple's Macs have the controller built-in to the SoC, so it's a sunk cost that doesn't really factor in to upgrade pricing.
Anyway, what you might consider insignificant differences are things companies do consider these worth paying for. You not caring isn’t the same thing as nobody caring.
> significantly affected by the choice of controller
Aka it is more complicated than just slapping different controller on the same chips and calling it a day.
Maybe that doesn't make it a bad comparison, but the SN850X is def intended to be a gaming part.
[1]: https://www.westerndigital.com/brand/wd-black
[2]: https://www.westerndigital.com/en-in/products/internal-drive...
Gamers are the ones buying expensive parts so it makes sense to market to that. The next tier after this is basically server-class 10-20k machines which Apple is definitely not competing with (and SSDs are not really that much better in that class anyway). Dismissing SSDs as “gaming” parts as if it’s diminishing the quality misunderstands what’s happening here. It would be one thing if WD was ignoring fsyncs to achieve this performance but gamers don’t care about writes so much anyway and there’s no indication WD did that.
Source: I have the WD and Samsung parts as well as cheapo random SSDs.
The point I was trying to make by pointing out that the SN850x isn't a "gaming part" is that the SN850x is literally the top-of-the-line, most expensive consumer SSD sold by WD, and has practically the same specs as other top-of-the-line, most expensive competing parts like the Samsung 990 Pro. Being one of the most expensive SSDs on the market means that saying that the SN850x is a bad comparison because it's supposedly "lower price" is just false on its face.
To be more clear, getting equal performance without sacrificing anything would raise costs even further.
It’s easy to say moderate premium over normal business grade SSD’s but that doesn’t mean any specific number is correct. I’d say the equivalent to a 130$ to 220$ SSD assuming a stand alone equivalent exited, but the actual number depending on info Apple isn’t sharing. And yes the range is both above and below the specific part suggested.
But anyway, in what world isn’t this a gaming product: https://shop.sandisk.com/products/ssd/internal-ssd/wd-black-...
“Built for elite gaming.
Crush load times and slash throttling, lagging, and texture pop-ins with the WD_BLACK SN850X NVMe™ SSD. …
Do more with WD_BLACK Dashboard The downloadable WD_BLACK Dashboard (Windows® only) monitors your drive’s health, lets you customize your RGB lighting, and, exclusively on the SN850X SSD, enables Game Mode 2.0 to transform your gaming experience.”
There really isn't. Apple is reported to use SanDisk 3D TLC NAND chips. SanDisk is owned by Western Digital, and the WD SSDs use SanDisk chips. They're literally the same chips.
Hell WD chips could be of higher quality as I am not suggesting I know their internal processes. I am saying things are optimized differently.
It could just come down to different binning of the same part, and it would still make a difference.
The why I’m still talking is because people seem to think buying a gaming SSD is a good idea when they also want longevity / low risk of future. The parts can last 10+ years but they’re designed with something else in mind.
One hardware guy mentioned internal defects can cause differences is the amount of reserve sectors that a final product ends up with. That’s exactly the kind of arbitrary cutoff that lets companies charge different prices for the same part.
Lower-grade flash with higher initial defect rates is what gets used in USB flash drives and SD cards, and some bargain-bin SSDs with lower usable capacities (ie. 960GB rather than 1TB).
The stuff used in a WD Black or WD Blue branded consumer SSD is not a different quality grade from the stuff used in any other mainstream consumer SSD, Apple's included.
At what grade? Plus, how much extra endurance is baked in to Apple's drives, i.e. how over-provisioned are they?
My MacBook Air M1 reports 99% health after being daily driven (and some 26TB written to it) at work since 2020 (we got these as soon as they introduced), and I don't baby its drive in any way.
Any flash storage has two main components: A controller and a set of flash chips, and a third component enters to the picture when connecting these two: number & nature of channels.
Starting from the controller (and channels), beside the obvious PCIe generation, there are some other factors. DRAM support, NAND support (not all NAND is the same!), number of channels, and the speed of these channels. A DRAMless SSD will suffer after its "pseudo-SLC" cache runs out, and the performance of the drive will generally suffer if the number of channels can't absorb the traffic coming from the PCIe side. Here, to have a top notch SSD, you need to have a good/fast controller with DRAM support, and enough channels with enough speed to absorb all traffic requests, so you can get use of the premium NAND chips you bought.
Next, we have the flash layout. Flash chips vary in speed, density and drive. A high density flash chip might be slower, or a flash chip might require higher drive, resulting in higher temperatures in general. In some cases, instead of populating all channels, a manufacturer might decide to populate a few channels and leave the rest unpopulated, creating a big but slower SSD.
Beyond that, there are other considerations like over-provisioning at flash level, "soft SLC cache" size, wear leveling capabilities under sustained load, etc. etc.
For example, an enterprise SSD comes with the "same" TLC chips, but over-provisioned 5:1 or 10:1 (10TB flash for 1TB capacity)
Now, let's see some real-world examples:
- Kingston NV2, NV3: A budget SSD with great capacity and price. DRAMless, no channel number guarantee, and might come in with TLC or QLC chips. Burst speeds are OK, will make 90% of the people happy, but slows down in long transfers and under heavy load. Runs cooking hot in both controller and flash side.
- Kingston KC3000: A higher end drive with part/channel guarantees, handles sustained load better, runs way cooler, ironically.
- Samsung 980/990 Pro: Samsung's higher end drive. Runs cool, sustains speed all over due to DRAM and tons of channels and vertical integration of controller + NAND.
- Samsung T7 Shield: Looks like an bulky 1.8" drive, but it's selling point is it can sustain 1050MB/s writes wihtout even slowing down until it's full. Never gets warm.
So, flash drives comes in all shapes and sizes and with specifications and capabilities all over the place. A WD Blue and WD Black won't perform the same. Same for Sandisk's Plus, Extreme, Extreme Pro series.
This is why OWC was/is the go-to 3rd party SSD provier for Macs for quite some time. They tune their drives similar to Apple's and very similar to what OS expects as behavior. It's not slap some controllers and flash chips on a PCB, change three fields in a firmware and sell.
Flash storage is black magic at this point, and thinking every box is the same is a big mistake.
This comment can be easily 3x longer, but I want to keep it readable.
That's just marketing language for "this is expensive af but you'll buy it because otherwise you're not an elite gamer!".
Their manufacturers provide 5 years warranties unlike Apple. AFAIK Apple doesn’t even disclose endurance ratings. Wouldn’t you expect the opposite?
Yep and it's possible to get much more out of it.
I've been running a Crucial MX100 256 GB SSD for 10 years. It's at 63% health from a S.M.A.R.T. readout. It's been powered on 125 times over ~10 years and transferred 56 TB in that time. It's my main Windows partition and runs WSL 2 where I've built and ran thousands of Docker images. Basically, it hasn't been sitting here unused.
At scale failures are more than just endurance ratings. Gaming laptops for example often cook their components due to prioritizing performance over long term stability. That doesn’t guarantee early failure, but it reduces the likelihood the system is working in 4 years.