Apple Silicon Soldered SSD Upgrade Thread

[waterchill]

I will try to reball tomorrow and try again. SDSF will not work K5A8 also not working.

 

[Bassy_92]

Hi folks,

today I got another M4 Air for an upgrade. But this MacBook didn’t have the usual K5A3 NANDs – instead it came with SDFRL5 chips. First, I tried replacing them with SDSFGK 1TB, but the restore failed. After that, I tried K5A8, same error. Then I tried K8A5 – the error was different this time, but still couldn’t restore. So I soldered back the original NANDs, and the restore worked perfectly fine.

My P15 programmer reports all the NANDs as OK, except the K8A5 which throws an error (apparently that’s normal with these chips). Any ideas what could be going on?

I have purchased a set of k8a5’s recently (sold as brand new). When inspecting the NANDs they did appear to look brand new and no signs of previously being soldered. However when I checked them with p15 I don’t get any errors, but they do show up as “incomplete partition” as tho they had been written on previous. Really odd

So my guess would be they it’s a set of bad NANDs if you are getting an error

 

[waterchill]

This message is normal, JCID have not updated they library for this NAND's

 

[mlucianoeze]

Hey there! Sorry if this isn't the right place to ask this, but have any of you had any experience with K5A5 before?

I currently have a base model Mac mini M4 with 256GB of storage, and planning to buy next month a MacBook Air M4 with 24GB RAM and 512GB. I want to upgrade both of them to 1TB each, so I'll go for 4xK5A5.

I've found this supplier that claims their chips are empty, but states that they need to be programmed manually. I assume that this is going to be done when restoring through DFU, right? So I won't need a NAND programmer I guess.

The thing is, I have a rather tight budget and I can't buy the programmer "just in case" (and even if I did, I'd need dump configs for both the mini and the MBA), so I really need to trust those chips are actually blank. I know I can't know that for sure, but if you've bought any K5A5 and want to recommend any supplier that had worked in the past, it'd be really appreciated

 

[Sauve Mon Mac]

You’re right, no need to program, they’ll be empty and DFU restore should work.

 

[mlucianoeze]

You’re right, no need to program, they’ll be empty and DFU restore should work.

Cool, thanks! I guess it boils down to trusting the supplier then. In your opinion, do you think the one I linked looks reliable? Do you have any other recommendations that have worked for you in the past?

 

[Wedlock]

First if i am going off topic with my question in this thread please delete me.

Anyway i wanted to upgrade my Studio M1 Max with a 2tb module from my standard 512gb config.
I contacted Polysoft asking when they would get new modules ready for pre-order but didn’t get a response.
Now i saw a seller on Aliexpress which sells 2tb for around 390 euro’s.
Now did anybody get a chance to try these and is it trustworthy to buy them ?