Wanna' Upgrade Your Mac Studio Internal SSD?

[HCMarkus]

This is soon to be a reality:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/po ... e?ref=card

Aftermarket M1/M2 Mac Studio Internal SSD Upgrades! VERY Professionally developed and accomplished.

M4 Minis are next:

Now let's talk about last week's surprise: like everyone else, we were delighted to discover that the new Mac mini M4 offers a replaceable SSD module up to 2TB, and that the Mac mini M4 Pro offers a replaceable SSD module up to 8TB.

These modules are physically different from each other, and also different from our Mac Studio M1 and M2 modules, but they're almost identical electronically, so we're already planning to work on them, benefiting from our work on the Mac Studio modules !

Priority will obviously be to deliver modules for the Mac Studio, but we're already starting work on the Mac mini M4 modules.

[mikehalloran]

I saw that when first announced. $940 vs $2400 as an add-on at purchase for 8TB is pretty attractive.

The Apple 8TB kit for the Studio is the same $2,800 price they were charging for the iMac Pro, 2019 Mac Pro and current MP. I considered upgrading my iMP but the numbers didn’t make sense to put that money in without increasing the resale value. So I went for the Studio. If I could have gotten the parts under a grand, I probably would have done it.

These guys are saying that the Mini takes different NAND than the Studio but that’s not making sense — perhaps the installation kit is different. No matter, theirs is still less than the Apple kits you find on eBay.

If you are tempted to do this, you must have another Mac available to initialize the new NAND over TB or Ethernet using a late enough version of Apple’s Configurator 2.app (takes a few minutes). This will install a recovery partition so that you can install the macOS and begin a Time Machine restore that can take many hours or even days if you had 4TB onboard before.