Since the NAND modules on the Mac Pro are easily user-accessible, I am dearly hoping that third-party solutions will become available from folks like OWC and others.
That is probably unlikely. What Apple has done with the daughter card NAND modules is chop the normal SSD into two pieces. SSD controllers are particularly configured to work with a subset of NANDs. All NAND chips are not equal. The the write , wear , etc characteristics differ between different vendors.
It is more akin to someone making replacement disk platters for a HDD drive they didn't build/design themselves. I think the expectations are way out of management if expected a 3rd party market for that.
Something more reasonable would be perhaps an expectation that Apple might sell these modules outside the tight repair supply chain over the longer term. They may not but that would be far more practical.
Based on reports, the connector is proprietary (to even other Macs like the iMac Pro) which means it is probably also patented,
The connector is far from being the critical path to making this 'work". The NAND have to match up and the custom Apple buffer chip would have to be duplicated. Relatively, the connector isn't a big deal and frankly a design patent is likely highly limited in usefulness.
but it doesn't make sense to me to make them easily-replaceable if there are no plans to offer an upgrade path after the initial BTO configuration ships to the customer.
It makes lots of sense for managing repair costs. ( don't need to replace whole motherboard for a wore out NAND chip .... which will fail over an extended period of time). Likewise folks who have "data destruction" protocols when retiring systems ( send the daughter card to the shredder at the service life ).
Folks with very high drive writes are going to need options over time.
And frankly it is also a play to using more affordable NAND chips to get to 4TB than if they were restrited to just using four NAND chips ( instead of eight).
And "upgrade path" probably would require a complete back-up to another storage disk, perhaps technician daughter card pairing to T2 , and a complete restore. [ it is not going to be put the old drive in a temporary container or "dock" and CCC/SuperDuper/Clone the bits to the new drive. ]. It isn't going to be Formula 1 like disk swaps even if Apple eventually enables it.
The other factor is logistics. How many folks are going to buy later and what sorts of inventory would Apple need to keep around to fill both parts repair and upgrades ( remember that folks have a myriad of other options to increase capacity so there is no 'herding' people into the upgrades Apple might offer. ) . Apple generally does not like inventory. The part prices would probably
not go down over time. $800 1TB module in 2019 , 2020, .... 2026, 2027 ... in those latter years how many are they going to sell ?
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Will the T2 accept strangers in there?
Probably not. The security integrity will probably need some validation. Wo Fat's chop shop NAND modules probably isn't going to meet with Apple security team review or the T2 SSD controller team's firmware requirements. Pragmatically these are the "internals" of a SSD that are dealing with here.
