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Upgrading an M4 Pro Mac mini's storage for half the price

(www.jeffgeerling.com)
421 points speckx | 2 comments | 11 Jul 25 14:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.414s | source
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GeekyBear ◴[11 Jul 25 15:55 UTC] No.44533662[source]▶
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...

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jeffbee ◴[11 Jul 25 16:00 UTC] No.44533738[source]▶
> Through all of these efforts, Anobit is promising significant improvements in NAND longevity and reliability.

Every flash controller does this. Modern NAND is just math on a stick. Lots and lots of math.

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dontlaugh ◴[11 Jul 25 16:06 UTC] No.44533804[source]▶
Presumably Apple want to be able to guarantee the quality of such logic.

Still sucks that you can’t use standard parts.

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daneel_w ◴[11 Jul 25 16:22 UTC] No.44534022[source]▶
Contrary to popular belief, you can run many different off-the-shelf brand NVMe drives on all of the NVMe-fitted Intel Macs. All you need is a passive adapter. My 2017 MacBook Air has a 250GB WD Blue SN570 in it.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/upgrading-2013-2015-mac...

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1. Rohansi ◴[12 Jul 25 05:45 UTC] No.44539625[source]▶
And all of the Apple Silicon Macs have them soldered on or use a proprietary module. They make way too much from storage upgrades to include an M.2 slot.
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2. daneel_w ◴[12 Jul 25 16:59 UTC] No.44543328[source]▶
The on-board storage of their MacBooks is as much, if not more, driven by their design vision. They didn't make these things record thin to get an excuse to use surface-mounted RAM and storage. I don't agree with it, but I understand it.