Just look them up on Amazon. There are only four or so sellers on the UK site. Only one has more than a couple of reviews and that one has a 23% one star rating for failures. It's still a gamble for sure.
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Upgrading M4 Mac Mini SSD: Pre-Soldered 2TB Chip Options
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Re weckhart's comment directly above:
"Just look them up on Amazon. There are only four or so sellers on the UK site. Only one has more than a couple of reviews and that one has a 23% one star rating for failures. It's still a gamble for sure."
Could the bloom be coming off the rose here?
That is, the risk of the quality of the do-it-yourself upgrades isn't all it's cracked up to be?
"Just look them up on Amazon. There are only four or so sellers on the UK site. Only one has more than a couple of reviews and that one has a 23% one star rating for failures. It's still a gamble for sure."
Could the bloom be coming off the rose here?
That is, the risk of the quality of the do-it-yourself upgrades isn't all it's cracked up to be?
All I know is mine continues to work wonderfully (typing on the Mini now).
I'll worry about "if it fails" ... if it actually happens.
A lot of this falls in the FUD camp, while many of us are enjoying the products just fine.
We could buy these a few times before approaching Apple upgrade pricing at time of purchase.
(this ^ is the real problem ... I'd be happy to buy first party, but not at "bend me over" pricing)
As always, keep your Time Machine drive up and running, whether you have first or third party storage.
I'll worry about "if it fails" ... if it actually happens.
A lot of this falls in the FUD camp, while many of us are enjoying the products just fine.
We could buy these a few times before approaching Apple upgrade pricing at time of purchase.
(this ^ is the real problem ... I'd be happy to buy first party, but not at "bend me over" pricing)
As always, keep your Time Machine drive up and running, whether you have first or third party storage.
Not really. Anecdotally, at least, the figure of a 25% failure rate of the NANDs seems about right given what various buyers of chips have said online, not just those used in the M4 upgrades. It's a matter of picking the right seller such that, if you are one of the unfortunate 25%, it isn't going to be onerous to send the faulty card back for a replacement/refund.
same here, purchased Bresun store @ aliexpress 2TB (Sandisk ) for $180 suprisingly working really well, runs so much cooler than my external Thunderbolt4 enclosure (Satechi 40gbs TB4 + 2TB WD SN850x total $279) booting from external apple intelligence and apple pay will not work.
Have two - because drives die and sometimes if you don't eject it properly it may be corrupted.
I got my notification from Iboff that my 8 layer pcb 2tb ssd has shipped. Looking forward to installing it when it arrives.
After waiting patiently (more than 7 weeks) for my 2TB SSD from Ali Express, I just got a notice that I’m eligible for a refund because it’s “delayed in transit”. No kidding. I’ll probably never receive this one.
I waited around to try to get an 8 layer board, but I’m giving up on that. What’s everyone’s experience right now?
Is anyone reliably shipping? iBoff isn’t accepting any new orders that I can see.
Has anyone ordered one *recently* and received it quickly?
I’m now tired of waiting. I just want to get one in my hands.
UPDATE: just went to the iBoff site, and they now seem to be accepting pre-orders. Because it’s shipped from Malaysia, I’m guessing that there will be fewer delays. *Hopefully.*
If anyone’s ordered an iBoff version, let me know about your experience.
Also, although the AliExpress site is a bit confusing to me, they did promptly issue a refund when the unit got stalled in shipment. (I was half expecting to lose that entire amount of money.) And, they said that I can keep the unit if it eventually shows up.
I waited around to try to get an 8 layer board, but I’m giving up on that. What’s everyone’s experience right now?
Is anyone reliably shipping? iBoff isn’t accepting any new orders that I can see.
Has anyone ordered one *recently* and received it quickly?
I’m now tired of waiting. I just want to get one in my hands.
UPDATE: just went to the iBoff site, and they now seem to be accepting pre-orders. Because it’s shipped from Malaysia, I’m guessing that there will be fewer delays. *Hopefully.*
If anyone’s ordered an iBoff version, let me know about your experience.
Also, although the AliExpress site is a bit confusing to me, they did promptly issue a refund when the unit got stalled in shipment. (I was half expecting to lose that entire amount of money.) And, they said that I can keep the unit if it eventually shows up.
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My order from the previous preorder (March time frame, which will be an 8 layer board) has shipped and I am just waiting for it too arrive. Communications with iboff (via email) has been good, and is usually a 24 hour turn around. When I reached out too them a little over a week ago about shipping status, their reply included pictures of my package with my shipping information and details on some final tests they run on every unit, such as a dfu restore and various electrical tests.
The tracking on mine indicate it shipped on the 24th, and on the 26th it updated to:
Transfer in progress
Your parcel is being transported to destination country
Will keep the thread updated when I get more info, and when it arrives.
I tried reading through this thread, but i’m a little lost on what is the recommended brand names. It seems like Sandisk or IBoff are recommended? Can someone help? There’s also Bresun and some websites.
I’m wondering if there are any reputable companies or at least ones that offer warranty?
I’m wondering if there are any reputable companies or at least ones that offer warranty?
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I don’t think you are going to find any typical brand names when it comes to these drives. You are gonna find the AliExpress offerings, which from what I can tell are generally the same. Then you will have some sellers like expandmacmini and m4-ssd that sell drives, and offer a communication path for support / warranty options, and their prices reflect that. Then you have iboff and potentially other companies that I am not aware of, that seem to show their entire process of how they reverse engineered their drive. Not sure if that means they are better, as there aren’t really any reviews out there I can find and the overall quality and support are unknown. I went with the Iboff option as I found their overview of how they designed their offering very interesting, and they do have a history of reverse engineering solutions for Macs. It was more expensive than the Aliexpress drives, but cheaper than some others.
The best advice this thread has instilled is make backups of your data.
There is a factory (JCID) mentioned earlier in this thread, which has cracked the ten layer board process that Apple uses. A few small sellers on AliExpress are using their boards to solder on whatever chips they can get hold of. While the board is the same, the quality of soldering and the chips used may vary so comparisons are tricky as the volumes sold don't appear to be very high based on the feedback they show.
Good to know! I assumed JCID will also put on the memory chips. i guess they only make the boards.
I definitely look forward to seeing reviews on the 10 layer boards. I got notification today that my iboff 8 layer board arrived in the US, so hopefully sometime early next week it arrives.
My 2TB iBoff drive arrived today. Going to do the install tomorrow and will report back.
Install completed, restored OSX without issue. Did a time machine restore, and a little bit of user permission fixes (since I had my home directory on an external drive) and I am back up and running.
Did a blackmagic disk test, and was peaked around 3200mb/s write and almost 3000mb/s read.
Will report back if I have any issues.
Did a blackmagic disk test, and was peaked around 3200mb/s write and almost 3000mb/s read.
Will report back if I have any issues.
Congrats! Question, is that what you expected? I haven't seen others reporting speed (haven't read the whole forum topic) but find that to be slower than I would expect. I am not suggesting it's not fast enough, just slower than I would expect all else being equal. Just curious.
Thanks for the report on the iBoff drive. I had an order from AliExpress cancelled on me, and decided to order from iBoff when they lifted their “sold out” sign a week or two ago.
How long did it take from ordering the drive to receiving it?
I did the last preorder round which was March 27. They initially indicated it would ship around April 30th, but they sent an update about delays in the manufacture process due to holidays. They got the devices at the end of April, they do a bunch of QC checks and it shipped out mid May. Took about a week to get to me.
It definitely isn’t a fast process, and that might because they are doing smallish manufacturing orders and not stocking items.
So far the drive is working as expected, and I don’t even think about it, which was kind of my goal.
I bought an Apple Certified Refurbished Mac Mini 256GB which had the 10GB ethernet port for £589 GBP. Then I ordered a 2TB internal expansion module from Expand Mac Mini (https://expandmacmini.com/) for £254 GBP on 26th May and it arrived on 6th June (11 days). Apparently they use the same NAND chips that Apple use. It came with an aluminium screwdriver with all the screwdriver bits required (3 different sizes) and a spreader tool to get the bottom case off. The whole procedure took about 20 minutes, very easy and I am delighted with it. Everything works as it should from my Carbon Copy Cloner migration. Speeds are great at 4800 MB/s write and 3000 MB/s read and temperature is nominal. Obviously time will tell, but as others have said, make sure you have more than 1 backup! Basically I got a M4 Mac Mini 2TB with 10GB ethernet for under £850 GBP, which would have cost £1,500 new from Apple. (In the pictures below, the Apple 246GB SSD is on the left and the Expand Mac Mini 2TB SSD is on the right for comparison). Hope that helps some people
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just a quick update using Aliexpress cheap SSD (4-layer) working very well with MacOS Tahoe beta.
