SSD in Mac Studio: is it upgradable?

[leman]

No it's not
And there is no good reason for that other than Apple chose to lock it down.

They absolutely could have made user accessible high spec NVMe (at least for additional storage for certain) and chose not to.

This is the nickel and dime, upsell, dongle, "services" company now.

Every single micro decision they make now is to squeeze another nickel.
Nothing is done for the benefit of users anymore

They are using a proprietary SSD interconnect, so standard NVME drives would not work. But I don’t think there is any technical reason against using some sort of proprietary SSD socket.

Funnily enough, I think one of the most valid reasons not to use a replaceable SSD is that people will probably complain that it’s not a standard M.2 connector and future legislations (like an extreme version of right of repair) might force Apple to use standard SSDs. By using a soldered-in SSD they can just say that it’s an integral part of the system.

 

[solouki]

There 6.7" x 6.7" ITX motherboards that have two NVMe SSD slots and four SATA ports for up to 16TB NVMe + 400TB SATA storage so no excuse for chunkier box so it's purely a money grab. Also, you can buy two Corsair 8TB NVMe SSDs for a little bit more than the price of Apple single 8TB upgrade. With storage trending bigger and cheaper over time you also miss out on future upgrades.

https://rog.asus.com/motherboards/rog-strix/rog-strix-z690-i-gaming-wifi-model/

https://www.corsair.com/us/en/Categories/Products/Storage/M-2-SSDs/MP400/p/CSSD-F8000GBMP400

Hi mi7chy,

So two Corsair 8TB NVMe SSDs for roughly the price as one Apple 8TB internal SSD, interesting. What speed would you get with these Corsair NVMe SSDs? Is it the same 7.5GB/s as Apple's internal SSD or is it <4.5GB/s? Thanks for the information, I'll take a look at your links. I think for most users a slower internal SSD would be perfectly fine, and so buying the smallest possible, super fast, internal Apple SSD and supplementing it with a large external, but slower, SSD storage is a great solution for most people.

Thanks,
Solouki

EDIT: mi7chy, I looked up the corsair link that you listed and see that for $1300 you can get one MP400 Corsair 8TB SSD, but this one has a maximum read speeds of 3.4GB/s and write speeds of 3.0GB/s -- considerably slower than Apple's internal SSDs that, in my hands, provide greater than 7.5GB/s read/write speeds.

 

[Cham2000]

There is only one Mac with a user upgradable SSD, the Mac Pro. None of the other T2 Macs had user upgradable SSDs.

So if the SSD fail (after the warranty), then there's no way to repair the Mac Studio (from some repair service shop) to change its SSD, right? That sucks!

 

[jdb8167]

So if the SSD fail (after the warranty), then there's no way to repair the Mac Studio to change its SSD, right? That sucks!

It’s a consequence of Apple’s new boot security. Apple silicon Macs always start the boot process from the internal SSD. The odds of a modern SSD failing after a year is pretty low. I wouldn’t spend a lot of time worrying about it. Something else unrepairable is just as likely to fail.

 

[solouki]

So if the SSD fail (after the warranty), then there's no way to repair the Mac Studio to change its SSD, right? That sucks!

Hi OP, I believe you can still send the Mac Studio to Apple, or an Apple certified service center, even after the warranty period, and they will be able to replace the SSD. Solouki

 

[jdb8167]

Hi OP, I believe you can still send the Mac Studio to Apple, or an Apple certified service center, and they will be able to replace it. Solouki

Almost certainly it would require a motherboard replacement. Out of warranty that is probably pretty expensive.

 

[leman]

Almost certainly it would require a motherboard replacement. Out of warranty that is probably pretty expensive.

A good solution to this would be Apple introducing some sort of reasonable fixed fee to address these kind of failures.

 

[solouki]

Hi jdb8167, leman, et al.,

Have any of you had an Apple internal SSD fail on any of your Macs? ... just curious.

 

[mi7chy]

Hi mi7chy,

So two Corsair 8TB NVMe SSDs for roughly the price as one Apple 8TB internal SSD, interesting. What speed would you get with these Corsair NVMe SSDs? Is it the same 7.5GB/s as Apple's internal SSD or is it <4.5GB/s? Thanks for the information, I'll take a look at your links. I think for most users a slower internal SSD would be perfectly fine, and so buying the smallest possible, super fast, internal Apple SSD and supplementing it with a large external, but slower, SSD storage is a great solution for most people.

Thanks,
Solouki

EDIT: mi7chy, I looked up the corsair link that you listed and see that for $1300 you can get one MP400 Corsair 8TB SSD, but this one has a maximum read speeds of 3.4GB/s and write speeds of 3.0GB/s -- considerably slower than Apple's internal SSDs that, in my hands, provide greater than 7.5GB/s read/write speeds.

Performance and endurance vary by capacity. Not too many buy the pricey 8TB and leave throughput review on Amazon but here's one for 2TB.

 

[solouki]

Performance and endurance vary by capacity. Not too many buy the pricey 8TB and leave throughput review on Amazon but here's one for 2TB.

Very interesting! I was quoting the 3.4GB/s Read 3.0GB/s Write speeds from Corsair's own website where they list these as the maximum possible speeds for their 8TB MP400 SSD. Interesting that Corsair wouldn't be so conservative as to under-spec their own SSD. Thanks.

 

[mi7chy]

Very interesting! I was quoting the 3.4GB/s Read 3.0GB/s Write speeds from Corsair's own website where they list these as the maximum possible speeds for their 8TB MP400 SSD. Interesting that Corsair wouldn't be so conservative as to under-spec their own SSD. Thanks.

Corsair web page also mentions:

That's probably for the base 1TB.

 

[leman]

Hi jdb8167, leman, et al.,

Have any of you had an Apple internal SSD fail on any of your Macs? ... just curious.

I have directly or indirectly managed over a hundred devices with Apple SSDs and I can’t remember experiencing a single SSD failure. We had general logic board failures, GPU failures, display failures, port failures, keyboard failures, even a CPU failure or two - in general around 5% of our devices had a failure in the first three years, which is the industry expected rate.

 

[solouki]

Hi mi7chy,

Yes, but I suspect that the "delivers up to" 3.4GB/s R/3.0GB/s W speeds are for the fastest speeds attained by any MP400, both from the English used as well as from a marketing strategy. I would also be a little surprised that an 8TB would get >7.1GB/s speeds while a 1TB would only get roughly 3GB/s speeds.

Thanks,
Solouki

 

[solouki]

I have directly or indirectly managed over a hundred devices with Apple SSDs and I can’t remember experiencing a single SSD failure. We had general logic board failures, GPU failures, display failures, port failures, keyboard failures, even a CPU failure or two - in general around 5% of our devices had a failure in the first three years, which is the industry expected rate.

Thanks loads for the information! I much appreciate your experiences with hundreds of Apple SSDs and computers; it's great to know such data.

Thanks, Solouki

 

[leman]

Hi mi7chy,

Yes, but I suspect that the "delivers up to" 3.4GB/s R/3.0GB/s W speeds are for the fastest speeds attained by any MP400, both from the English used as well as from a marketing strategy. I would also be a little surprised that an 8TB would get >7.1GB/s speeds while a 1TB would only get roughly 3GB/s speeds. For instance, an Apple 2TB SSD as well as an Apple 8TB SSD both get >7.5GB/s speeds.

Thanks,
Solouki

Bigger SSDs are usually faster because internally the flash chips are operating in parallel. It is a bit similar to RAID0 operation - the data is stripped across multiple storage chips so you can get higher aggregated speeds when accessing it.

 

[leman]

Thanks loads for the information! I much appreciate your experiences with hundreds of Apple SSDs and computers; it's great to know such data.

Thanks, Solouki

Just a quick remark: it’s not hundreds of SSDs. It’s “over a hundred”. I don’t have exact counts and I have quit my IT manager position so I dint have access to that data anymore.

 

[solouki]

Bigger SSDs are usually faster because internally the flash chips are operating in parallel. It is a bit similar to RAID0 operation - the data is stripped across multiple storage chips so you can get higher aggregated speeds when accessing it.

Yes, thanks, I understand this ... but I had not seen >2 times faster R/W speeds for the larger sizes of the same SSDs. (I stand corrected.)

Solouki

EDIT: In other words, I suspected that the 2TB SSD still had the same number of flash chips and thus the same amount of parallelism as the 8TB SSD; it's just the 2TB SSD's chips were 1/4th the size as the 8TB SSD's chips.

 

[Cham2000]

Someone can confirm officially that all internal SSD of Silicon Mac are encrypted? And that we can't boot the computer using an external SSD?

 

[leman]

Yes, thanks, I understand this ... but I had not seen >2 times faster R/W speeds for the larger sizes of the same SSDs. For instance, in my hands, Apple's 2TB and 8TB SSDs are nearly identical in R/W speeds, i.e., they are not significantly different and certainly not >2 times different speeds.

Solouki

Older Apple-branded SSDs definitely did have varied performance by SSD size. If never SSDs are all equally fast it would mean that Apple is using more expensive and rigorous techniques to achieve this consistent quality. It wouldn’t surprise me to be honest. Current generation of Apple SSDs are if an exceptional quality and their endurance is considerably higher than that of consumer SSDs.

 

[leman]

Someone can confirm officially that all internal SSD of Silicon Mac are encrypted? And that we can't boot the computer using an external SSD?

They are encrypted at the controller level (controller is part of the SoC). You can boot from an external SSD, but the internal SSD needs to be operational for that.

 

[solouki]

Older Apple-branded SSDs definitely did have varied performance by SSD size. If never SSDs are all equally fast it would mean that Apple is using more expensive and rigorous techniques to achieve this consistent quality. It wouldn’t surprise me to be honest. Current generation of Apple SSDs are if an exceptional quality and their endurance is considerably higher than that of consumer SSDs.

Isn't the parallelism more-or-less dependent on the number of chips? And thus as long as the 2TB, 4TB, and 8TB SSDs have the same number of chips then they would have roughly similar speeds?
Thanks, Solouki

 

[Cham2000]

They are encrypted at the controller level (controller is part of the SoC). You can boot from an external SSD, but the internal SSD needs to be operational for that.

Do you have an official source/reference for this? And what is SoC ? System on Chip?

 

[solouki]

Hi leman,

I really appreciate your expertise and information. Thanks.

I always runs various tests on my computers (e.g., the Macs) when they are brand new and before I put any of my data or code on them (this way I can check them later to see if they have experienced any degradation). (I stand corrected.)

Solouki

 

[mi7chy]

Hi mi7chy,

Yes, but I suspect that the "delivers up to" 3.4GB/s R/3.0GB/s W speeds are for the fastest speeds attained by any MP400, both from the English used as well as from a marketing strategy. I would also be a little surprised that an 8TB would get >7.1GB/s speeds while a 1TB would only get roughly 3GB/s speeds. For instance, an Apple 2TB SSD as well as an Apple 8TB SSD both get >7.5GB/s speeds.

Thanks,
Solouki

Corsair 1TB still reports faster throughput than their legalese.

Even for Macbooks it varies by capacity.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/mbp-2021-ssd-speed-comparison-please-contribute.2320899/

14" - M1 Pro 8/14 16GB 512GB (Base)
Write: 4300-4700 MB/s
Read: 5200-5500 MB/s
(bluegt)

Write: 4314 MB/s
Read: 5480 MB/s
(waquzy)
(cababah - same)

16" - M1 Pro 10/16 16GB 512GB (Base)
Write: 4400 MB/s
Read: 5137 MB/s
(muasachi)

Write: 4770 MB/s
Read: 5448 MB/s
(Matck06)

16"- M1 Pro 10/16 1TB
Write: 5224 MB/s ?
Read: 5154 MB/s
(macnmac)

16"- M1 Max 64GB 1TB
Write: 5700-5900+ MB/s ?
Read: 5100-5300 MB/s
(nikhsub1)

14" - M1 Max 10/32 64GB 2TB
Write: 6100-6400 MB/s ??
Read: 5300-5450 MB/s
(chengengaun)

16" - M1 Max 10/32 64GB 2TB
Write: 6300 MB/s ??
Read: 5450 MB/s
(radus)

Write: 6360 MB/s ??
Read: 5410 MB/s
(iClarified YouTube, thanks theorist9)

16" - M1 Max 10/32 64GB 4TB
Write: 6626 MB/s ???
Read: 5652 MB/s
(vivid.gear71)

Write: 7305 MB/s ????
Read: 5753 MB/s
(sanandreas1234)
(albertjs)

16" - M1 Max 64GB 4TB
Write: 7398 MB/s ????
Read: 5855 MB/s
(alfogator)

16" - M1 Max 64GB 8TB
Write: 7292 MB/s ????
Read: 5519 MB/s
(nethead)

 

[solouki]

Corsair 1TB still reports faster throughput than their legalese.


Even for Macbooks it varies by capacity.

Yes, interesting. I don't know how these numbers were obtained, and what was happening on each machine when the speed tests were run, but I find it interesting that what appears to be the same machine would have such disparate speed test values: for instance, two of the 4TB numbers listed are Write 6626MB/s as well as Write 7398MB/s (significantly different values). I think this is the reason why I always run these SSD tests on new machines without any data or extra programs loaded and freshly booted. Repeated runs (after the new machines had finished their indexing/optimization) then yielded much closer numbers in my hands...