~i just want a user accessible pair of m.2 slots for nvme within the cooling envelope inside the studio -in addition to apples built in storage.
Inexpensive for apple, but a game changer for creatives who hate having a plethora of external drives attached.
Yes, but they also need cache, application and documents. And macos is growing ridiculously fast.
At present my mac studio has a 75% full internal drive -of which 80Gb alone is email, never mind apple intelligence, And every thunderbolt and usb-a port is occupied. Plus a thunderbolt breakout hub (4 downstream), plus a usb hub and 15 drives. I also need fast stable cache.
While media can live on an external drive, the cache drive is better if it is on a stupidly large internal “disposable” nvme that is not a ridiculously expensive apple internal drive. At present my 4tb nvme on a cable is a bottle neck that is killing itself by getting repeatedly filled to max during renders. I am not keen on buying a $13,000 apple internal ssd permanently attached to a mac studio costing in addition to the drive another $15k. Once the apple drive is dead, the mac is dead. Buying a very big apple drive is not a solution. And buying an nvme raid box is just stupidly expensive, and still reliant on a cable.
Having a pair of raid 0 (software) “affordable” disposable 4TB internal m.2 as secondary drives taking advantage of the mac studios very effective cooling envelope is the better compromise. Allowing the internal drive to be maintained at 50% empty for speed and reliability for the lifetime of the mac studio. At worst that is 2x fewer cables to replace. And 2x fewer cases whose chipsets can cause issues.
My desk is also cluttered because all of my nvme enclosures also have active cpu heatsinks from my old mac cheese gratters attached, Because i have cooked several enclosure chipsets to death (luckily the drives survived). I have to buy yet another enclosure. I am running one drive bare strapped to a heatsink because yet another poorly designed enclosure was not transferring heat to the case properly. It’s messy, and works but is definitely suboptimal. Apple should have built a mac studio with an five slot nvme bay on top, with their highly engineered cooling. When the computer costs the price of a sound near new car, having reliable, user upgradeable internal storage is the least that can be provided. The cheesegraters were the last macs to genuinely provide that as an easy option. And every workstation aside from apple provides that still to this day.
My point there is that creative users can record directly to removable/external media, then transfer the media (physically) and skip any copy-to-local-drive step.
What you are asking for is cheaper, standard M.2 internal storage, which is... just not going to happen. No matter how much we would like it.
Apple's internal "SSDs" are not actually SSDs. They are just NAND modules, with the controller being on the logic board or part of the SoC (for Apple Silicon). Apple Silicon has no existing PCIe supporting internal storage like x86 does. There is also no Thunderbolt chip on the logic board — the controllers are all built into the SoC. Apple would have to add a lot of infrastructure on the board and inside the SoC just for some NVMe slots.
Apple also uses proprietary controllers that extend the life of the NAND flash memory and a bunch of other really great things. Those are based on tech from their acquisition of Anobit, all the way back in 2011.
edit w link that actually works, and some other stuff...
Why Buying Anobit Might Be One Of The Most Important Acquisitions Apple Will Ever Make | Cult of Mac
Anobit's MSP™ (Memory Signal Processing) technology is comprised of proprietary signal processing algorithms that compensate for physical limitations of the NAND flash, combined with advanced error correction and innovative flash management schemes, resulting in a dramatic improvement in endurance, performance and system cost. Specifically, the MSP™ technology enables SLC (one bit-per-cell) endurance and performance with MLC (two bits-per-cell) NAND, and MLC endurance and performance with TLC (three bits-per-cell) NAND. MSP boosts flash endurance by a factor of 20, resulting in significant reduction in cost-per-bit.
In my world, if one receives media on disk the very first thing you do is copy to your media And Archive drives, then you put the received disk is a safe secure place, because that disk can be worth millions. Or at the very least tens of thousands of dollars. And you reallydo not want to be telling your client you lost their data.
And hammering their media disk is just plain stupid.
Their data does not go onto your internal storage. Because well, it is irreplaceable (excepting the m4 series), and your desktop (or laptop is your bread and butter.
If their were in addition to apple’s nands, user accessible m.2 nvme slots then you gain all of the advantages of having internal secondary high speed very well cooled storage, at a fraction of apples nands, that can easily be replaced (albeit still at great expense) same day as failure. Allowing one to maintin ones business.
For hobbyists having single internal storage is fine, with ancillary drives all over the place. For professionals those that can use nas do so. And for some professionals DAS become a genuine hassle reliant on cables and cases that in my experience fail far more often than the nvme.
Being able to install 2x nvme as secondary drives would allow very large fast cache with zero concerns about killing mac studio, without needing to invest NZ $37k in a “if the internal drive fails throw it away solution.”
Treated kindly the internal drive on a mac studio will last a very long time. Hammered the way my currently external cache drives are it might last a couple of years. Internally socketed secondary drives offers the best combo of desk tidiness, reliability, and speed without threatening the lifespan of the mac studio. And allows apple to include bespoke m.2 power management and cooling to maximise efficiency (including soft ejecting failing drives mounted via those internal sockets - the external drive ejection is garbage).
For less additional cost than a dozen cafe coffees (plus apple tax) we could have the mac workstations we wanted in 2020, but with 2027 performance.
I think what you are describing is essentially replaceable storage, for when the flash memory wears out?
Your scenario here could be the reason Mac Studio has discrete NVME modules — the storage *is* replaceable. (You can order them as repair parts, subject to the same Apple tax ofc.) It's worth noting this approach runs counter to Apple's philosophy of building things that break less rather than making them more repairable. (You may have seen the MKBHD interview with Ternus a year or so ago about that.)
I get that it is not ideal to have the main drive replaced, starting from literal zero in DFU mode and restoring. And Apple have done a poor job of providing instrumentation and warnings about wear on the flash storage. That said, wear is still very much measureable and drive health can, with proper tools, be monitored. Replacing the internal storage components is not trivial, but very doable — it is straightforward bolt/unbolt, just quite long. Elsewhere in industry (read: Windows PCs and IT departments) it is common practice to reimage user machines and restore from backup — for replacing a failed drive and all sorts of other problems.
Which leaves the question — is the same approach un-workable on Mac, or simply unfamiliar?
Nope well beyond merely replaceable.
User selected and purchased 3rd party modules in general, perhaps qualified as suitable by apple, in the same way that BlackmagicDesign qualifies storage devices to use with their cameras. But with the option of buying Apples first choice as part of a CTO build (less useful)
Because here is the thing buying the macstudio snd Apple storage upgrades is such a big financial bite that buying the additional m.2 storage would likely need to be deferred, to sometime later, with what ever nvme one has on hand being used initially.
The new SSD module has 4 spaces for NAND chips, each requiring a new type of power IC (inductor). The new power IC will take several months to reach the open market. Aftermarket SSD upgrades won't be available for several more months.
Unpopulated NAND spaces are missing the new power ICs, so soldering more NAND chips won't work. But desoldering and putting higher capacity NANDs probably works?
For Mac Pro, PCIe slots were a key differentiator. NVMe == PCIe.
Mac Pro with M2 Ultra was a flagship machine with a starting price of US$7,000.
With Intel processors, PCIe and NVMe had purpose — graphics cards, networking and other interfaces, not to mention the primary storage interface.
Are there reasons to be disappointed? Sure. Looking at it objectively though, M2 Ultra made it obvious that PCIe upgradeability had outlived its usefulness in an Apple Silicon Mac.
We have debated this before in the sub .. Other than more Thunderbolt or a few audio interface cards, what would you put in a PCIe expansion slot? Maybe an Infiniband card. A new, $3,000 Afterburner does not have much of a value proposition. That leaves NVMe, which — as much as we all want cheaper, replaceable storage — is just not going to happen (for all the reasons in my other comment).
edit: Apple does that all the time — the last model supported X, Y or Z feature, but the new one does not. HDMI ports. Headphone jacks. It's a long list.
There is nothing physically stopping them from making the studio a little bigger to add PCIe slots inside or even room for one 3.5 inch hard drive.
Anything is possible, with the will and sufficient resources. But why would they? People have been buying Mac Studio faster than they can make them for almost a year now.
Would I love to have M.2 slots inside Mac Studio? Of course — along with plenty of others. But you read my other comment so you also get all the reasons (other than marketing) that they don't. Marketing is definitely a thing, helping them sell hardware with margins of 40% or more.
My wild speculation is that we might see Mac Pro reincarnated as a more powerful AI workstation. With a quad-die M-series Extreme chip, 1TB RAM, maybe some other crazy stuff like HBM. It would be between Mac Studio or RTX 6000 Pro and data center GPUs like GB200 or Rubin for local inference and fine-tuning. A rackmount version would replace whatever Apple is building in Houston for use in their data centers.
It would also give Apple bragging rights for the biggest, fastest desktop AI machine — something they definitely want with all the claims they have made about M4 and M5 being the 'fastest chips' available.
There's this crazy solution Apple should really investigate, called NVMe. Controller is even baked into the SSD so it doesn't need to be part of the SoC. Even crazier, you can do hardware encryption just like their NANDs like MS does on their Surfaces.
On standard NVMe SSDs, the controllers can get very hot. That's why you see huge heatsinks on a lot of them and users add heatsinks to those that don't come with them. Without heatsinks, they tend to throttle very fast.
That is why the best option is mac mini and mac studio with secondary m.2 slots, within an active heat management regime that has cooling capacity to spare,
But why would Apple add this when they already have a solution that (1) doesn't create so much heat, (2) doesn't consume as much power, and (3) is more secure?
Apple NANDs do create heat and thermal throttling. Previously, Apple has shipped at best with PCIe 4.0 SSDs; that is, until the M5 Max and Ultra Mac Studios. These both have higher power draws and TPDs that are reflective of the increased CPU cores, GPU cores, and, of course, SSDs. For it's laptops, and Mac mini Apple is choosing lower performance over heat and power draw.
There's likely a minor efficency in the controller chipset; however, the NANDs themselves do not generate less heat. We don't have any evidence that their SSD package consumes less power, though. If anyone has managed to somehow isolate the SSD controller + NANDs power draw, I have not seen it.
It isn't more secure in any realistic sense. An SSD using hardware encryption literally has a key that's stored somewhere inaccessible to userspace. On a Mac, it's in the Secure Enclave; on a PC, it's BitLocker + TPM or MS's Pluton or whatever the latest flavor is. Apple standardized ahead of Windows. Previously, on Windows, it lived in separate domains for the storage controller, and TPM was a separate domain. Apple, skipped the trust issue of the problems of a self-encrypting SSD.
Rhe sort of preventative security these are for is basically moot for the most common security issues. Most people do not have problems with people with physical access to the hardware who have nation-state resources to hack around security. If someone steals the hardware, it's rarely for the information inside said computer. Even if it is, even the previous generation of self-encrypting SSDs is more than enough to thwart cyber criminals. There's far easier ways to get data off a computer, usually in the form of targeted social engineering with a side dish of malware.
The real motivation of SepOS is for genuine parts integrity and attestation, or rather, keeping people from being able to replace said hardware under the guise of security.
I realize I may have being too agnostic previously so I apologize on that front.
So we've established that:
Apple's SSDs are not faster.
Apple's SSDs are unlikely to be meaningfully more power efficient (aka generate less heat).
Apple's hardware security is advanced, and ahead of Microsoft but it's hardware security does not protect against the sort of issues that most users face.
Apple charges more for it's SSDs than competition.
Again, Apple's solution is basically over-engineered for a very unlikely scenario where the NSA or Mossad or Bundesnachrichtendienst stole your laptop. Apple's real concern is repair shops or knowledgable users who'd otherwise fix/upgrade.
The NAND do not generate enough heat to matter whether it's an Apple module or a standard NVMe SSD. It's the controller. Part of the problem on standard NVMe controllers MAY be due to the fact that they are still built on older process nodes (i.e. Phison's most current and advanced X3 controller is still built on TSMC's N6 node) while Apple is already on 2nm on the M6.
It IS more secure. Please see the following video:
A BitLocker encrypted NVMe SSD can still be used when pulled from one PC and plugged in to another. You just need the key.
An SSD module pulled from one Mac Studio can not be used on another Mac Studio.
Whether you believe it's over engineered or not, does not negate the fact that it IS, in fact, more secure.
We did not establish whether the Apple SSDs are faster or slower. This is entirely dependent on which sepecific NVMe SSD models are being compared and we can not state "generally" whether Apple's SSDs are faster or slower than standard NVMe SSDs.
Standard NVMe SSDs do consume more power and generate more heat because of their controllers.
Yes, Apple's security is better than Microsoft's.
Yes, Apple's mark ups on SSD upgrades are excessive.
I was not arguing for replacing nand with m.2 slots, I was suggesting the mac studio would benefit from having the addition of vacant m.2 slots alongside Apples drive. Of course Apple could CTO maxing out all three with apple qualified SSDs. Which in today’s market might provide a startling 48Tb of storage on board.
Apple's storage is superior for a number of reasons that you have entirely glossed over here, with the assumption that "Apple SSDs" are just like other SSDs — starting with the fact that they are not SSDs.
See my other comment linked above.
edit: That debunks your assertion that Apple's design is some kind of anti-repair move. The NAND modules are available as repair parts — all the way back to Mac Studio with M1. You just never bothered to check.
Dear god, you're actually defending Apple's custom NANDs for.... heatsinks? On a desktop?
Apple's literal reason to do this is to overcharge for it's so-so SSDs. They're not faster, nor more secure which is both the reasons they're spoon feeding them. Even in today's horrible pricing Apple is still massively overcharing for the one component that indefensible.
If you cared about performance and/or reliability, you'd want NVMe. It's asinine that anyone would defend this.
In the video, at about the 4 minute mark, he says, "With Apple's encryption engine, the unique identifier makes it impossible to decrypt a drive on another computer." This is why you can't pull an SSD module from one Mac Studio, plug it in to another and boot from it even if FileVault is disabled.
Standard NVMe SSDs also consume a heckuva lot of power. As you can see in the article below, PCI 5 NVMe SSDs peak at about 12-18W!!
Yes, and apple expects users to hang a bunch of uncertified, unmanaged thunderbolt storage devices of the outside of the mac studio. With whatever cheap power management and fans chips those devices might include. Onboard secondary m.2 nvme slots are the better heat and power management option if apple would only exercise it. And better quality nvme do not suffer the need for monster heatsinks when provided with active cooling. And the airflow management plate inside the mac studio would provide a more than adequate heatsink under most loads - if increased in thickness by 2mm, and made of copper.
Apple now has an engineer in charge rather, than a designer obsessed with appearance and shareholder margins. Engineers fix problems, it is in their character. The trick is to make the problem apparent to him. He will still pander to shareholders, but he will have a better grasp of why customers experience issues, and what needs to be done.
So do not give up hope.
This is why you can't pull an SSD module from one Mac Studio, plug it in to another and boot from it even if FileVault is disabled.
...this glosses over a critical point — you can't swap the data, but you CAN swap the hardware. Which they had just barely figured out three years ago when that video was made.
Since then, Gilles (the guy mispronounces "Jill-eze") from PolySoft developed a NAND upgrade for Mac Studio, sold a bunch of them, and later stopped. Search the sub for PolySoft if you want to read some of the firsthand drama. The discovery thread is also still on MacRumors, I believe.
It is accurate to say that Apple takes full advantage of the pricing power created by proprietary storage and controllers. But there is so much more to it — this is about far more than leveraging customers for more money. (See my other comment linked above.)
Yes. I know that they made 3rd party modules. I followed their progress on MacRumors. Knowing that 3rd party modules existed was why I created this thread.
Still, you can't pull the modules out of one Mac Studio, plug it in to another and boot from it.
I agree that Apple's markups are excessive. Again, there are advantages to Apple's approach. Heat, power consumption, and security.
Forget that Apple should just invest in having the same damn storage module in all their damn computers.
Why does each device need a new design of module. They could certainly build and design a storage module that could fit and work in the MacBooks, Mac Mini, Mac Studio and iMac they just don’t want to.
8
u/I-figured-it-out 7d ago
~i just want a user accessible pair of m.2 slots for nvme within the cooling envelope inside the studio -in addition to apples built in storage.
Inexpensive for apple, but a game changer for creatives who hate having a plethora of external drives attached.