M1 Mac Mini Soldered SSD Upgrade
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 ต.ค. 2024
- In this video, @lukemiani joins me to perform a soldered storage upgrade on his Apple M1-based Mac Mini, taking it from the base 256GB configuration all the way to the maximum of 2TB! While the upgrade process itself is generally straightforward, a combination of either bad NANDs or improperly programmed NANDs made the process a bit more difficult than it otherwise would be. In the end, the upgrade was successful, and the key in this case was to ensure the NANDs installed are new, unprogrammed/blank chips.
Check out Luke's video here: • UPGRADING an M1 Mac mi...
What a wild ride we had here 😆 very stressful but very rewarding in the end LOL
If I did such thing, my hands would be shaking like crazy! I didn't know this was possible, you two did some incredible stuff here!
I’m hoping you will report back after 3 and/or 6 month to give us a reliability FOLLOWUP, especially because those NANDs are not new.
Still no idea what was wrong with one of those chips or both? It's just guessing or? 😮
did you make a review on this one like do some edits and file transfer
@@dplj4428🎉🎉
Really sucks that someone has to go through this kind of trouble to upgrade something that was easily upgradeable a few years ago in a Mac Mini
Don't worry, I'm sure in next year's models Apple will replace the chips with ones with some kind of cryptographic security in them so that the only way to upgrade your storage is to buy an entirely new Mac 😉
@@radiosificationfor sure
Stop buying Apple anticonsumer hardware
Doesn't suck for Apple, they are laughing all the way to the bank
@@ytdlgandalf you're absolutely right. I don't own a single Apple product and as long as they keep up this sort of anti-consumer behaviour I never will.
Collin is so skilled that he was able to get it done even with questions and commentary from Luke. He's a true professional.
Do you know if they are neighbours or if Luke has driven a lots of mile ?
That is where you set the bar? Skill is the ability to run ones mouth and work? You clowns really do set the bar low.
@@Look_What_You_Did Well, I think the impressive part was doing pioneering BGA work on an M1 Mac; fielding questions from Luke at the same time was just an additional challenge.
@@idubzh243 Luke just moved into that basement! :)
@@axi0maticOnly impressive part, maybe, is that it's a Mac. Apple for decades has been making shit hard to fix or upgrade. I remember having to unsolder the ram from the motherboard of my friend's Mac in the late 90s
what could be super interesting is to mount a bracket to the M1 board, to allow for quick insert and release of the NAND chips so you can make a whole series testing out what works and not + get a NAND programmer to erase the chips.
unfortunately BGA110 socket costs more than Mac M1 Board itself :) however it could be printed with good resin printer..
They got sockets just for that.
@@memadmax69 No, just for the board, the socket between the chip and board isn't proprietary
I may buy another Mac after all, realising I can buy lowest size SSD, and self upgrade to 4TB or more, as long as blank. What is the limit?
Imagine all these people buying kit to learn to do surface mount work. The skills we learn are valuable, perhaps priceless.
Trashing a brand new machine is unlikely right, but if it cost less than half the spec you desired, there’s room to buy another and learn from the mistake. That’s always going to be more valuable than initially buying the full spec.
@@alanwest6949 If you dont have experience with hot air rework this is not the place to start learning
I swear this guy is a time traveler that was sent to help us keep devices longer and prevent Apple from ruling the world in 2030. Amazing stuff dude.
Apple is crap, never support such company! There's better invention & company out there!
so real
So he's basically the technician version of John Connor.
Gotcha.
Dude… your level of patience with this upgrade is commendable. Nice work!
Having watched this video first and then Luke's, it's certainly tantalizing when you take into consideration that, as Luke mentioned in his video, RAM swaps for Apple Silicon have been attempted as well. I would love to see you guys try that. Both your's an Luke's videos have been amazing, informative, a bit tense which add to the entertainment factor. Great work!
the fact that the new software is there to prevent this says how much apple likes their customers
I completely trust Collin on his judgement with how he installs these chips. He modded a 2012 Macbook Air for me so that it has 16gb of Ram and a 2.9ghz CPU that spikes to 3.6ghz. I constantly use the Macbook and have had no problems with it in any fashion. Thank you for you work Collin you truly deserve the respect.
Dude, this video has everything! Drama. Suspense. Sticking it to the man! Heartbreaking defeat with a surprise twist at the end! Its better entertainment than most of the Hollywood movies I've seen lately.
It’s absolutely disgusting you have to solder to upgrade hardware. Why can’t Apple use NVMe’s?
Because is targeted to morons
That way they profit off repair.
How could they charge a premium for cheap storage then? Do you ever think of the poor poor billion dollar company Apple? No, you only think about yourself.
$$$$ . Apple knows that fanboys will pay up regardless😅
question not even worth asking (although the answer is, of course, profit).
vote with your money, end the atrocities and stop supporting these dickheads
Why does this guy only have 90k subscribers? A guy like you should be exposed more and have millions. More power to you!
Damn. Major respect. You have balls of steel and sick soldering skills.
Nope, the balls are made of solder, rest is true :-).
Collin's voice is so calming, even though i know he is stressed doing this operation.
I truly appreciate your honesty to show every step even failed one.I also admire your patience and determination to get the job done.Considering the risks and try and error process it could be a dead mac mini now .I personally wouldn't go through this nerve wrecking process to expand my drive capacity.
I think this wasn't so much about expanding the capacity as it was at looking into what works and does not. My take away is that the chip zero must be the one with the programming, while chip 1 is the blank one. Makes sense. Regardless, I'll be using my Jobs' era macs until they die, then it's off to linux. Fairly well done with Apple until they get past this return to the 1990's Michael Spindler CEO era of non-upgradable machines. Everyone forgets that this BS was done already and it took Steve Jobs returning to bring the company back from the brink of extinction.
@@foodandart5808
Well unfortunately iPhone is keeping them alive now even if everything else fails iPhone and iPad sells are insane for them to be willing to change anything I do agree with you I would never own an apple computer
I do think you're underestimating the heat soak of those boards personally. I would say you need to go a bit hotter to be honest. Also I think your hands were a little too shakey. One thing I do is rest my palm on the table which allows me to prevent my hand from shaking. Other than that, great job! Keep them coming bud
This is the very reason I swapped out our 2018 intel Mac mini for a self built PC for our church presentation computer. Luckily ProPresenter 7 now works just as good on the pc as it does the mac. I have 2x2tb Cardea nvme drives with one being cloned to the other every week. If one dies, we can immediately swap to booting off the other with little to no data loss and then spend $120 and replace the one that died if it's out of the 5yr warranty
You better check on the TBW on the two drives and swap the two once in a while. Warranty on TBW aside, unbalanced writes like that makes your backup drive more likely to fail.
Also 2TB ADATA SX8200 pro are as low as $75 nowadays
@@harrytsang1501 they have an 1800TBW (per TB). That's 98% of the drive, every day for 5 years (warranty period). The sx8200 only has 640tbw (per TB), thus the cheap price
I can totally feel the joy and satisfaction from you guys.
can you check the speed of the new 2tb NAND compared to the original mac mini m1 speed. very cool and worthwhile upgrade. luckily it works. ive seen iBoff RCC videos saying that the SSD contorller for m1 macs are embedded in the m1 SOC thats why theres a compatibility issue.
Mixing probably worked because the solder connections may have been bettered after multiple heat gun and cool offs. Probably also good links from the soldered balls without cross connections.
That’s the only thing I can think of as to why this configuration worked.
Very well done! I consider doing it myself, but wasn’t sure if it would work. Recently I upgraded the storage of my 13 Pro Max from 128GB to 1TB, very satisfying especially when you do it yourself and it works afterwards. Keep up the good work.
How did you do this and what process did you follow?
Yeah, interesting to hear more about your iPhone upgrade
What is a 13 Pro Max with 128GB
@@mitchec100iPhone?
@@affieuk I bought 1TB NAND from aliexpress, disassembled the phone and took the logic board out. I then desoldered the original NAND, and soldered the new one to the board. The process is basically the same as in this video, although somehow a bit more involved as it is smaller board.
Well earned result, congratulations for your calm focus and determination!
Very impressive work. My nerves would never cope with this kind of uncertainty.
What a roller coaster ride. Always amazed at your skill and ‘can-do’ attitude. Thanks for adding so much value to the Mac tinkering community.
Would love to see you swap the LPDDR5 ram on the A16 with the new LPDDR5T and see the performance gains! This video was really inspiring to see what else is possible!!❤
This is what I did successfully time after time.
Principle : let gravity to do the parting.
Do :
0) apply soldering flux around the IC to be removed.
1) with a precision tweezer, lift the IC together with the mother board 0.5~1cm above the table. (The far side of mother board may touch the table)
2) apply soldering hot air on top of the IC
3) when all solder joints of IC are in flow state, mother board will fall gently on the table leaving the IC behind by the tweezer.
Benefit ? Never can the mother board or SMD parts getting overheated.
I remember being in Luke's Mac studio twitter thread and discussing bga110 upgrades about a year/year and a half ago - thoroughly surprised a big youtuber is into documenting a big no-no that is bga rework.
Anyway, that's some elite work as always and hope your next step is bga315!
It absolutely will be!
@@dosdude1any chance is possible to upgrade m1 MacBook Pro 13 inch to same 2 tb in simlure way
@@NicVandEmZ Yep! Same exact process applies to ANY M1 machine.
@@dosdude1what about M2 (specifically M2 Max MBP?) Please do a vid on that! And maybe try the RAM too.
Heck yeah! Glad you got it working!
If you get your hands on a BGA110 NAND programmer, it would be quite interesting to see what is going on with the other two ICs. I wonder if there's some type of failure, or if the "blank" one had firmware on it already.
Not sure if that programmer actually supports these chips for M1 (I saw in another video by a chinese blogger that said the M1 chips are a bit bigger than the ones used in iPhone 11).
The original two may have been pulled from bad equipment or rejected or patched chips. Those chinese companies are really good for this, especially on spendy parts.
@reidster87, that would be the next logical step.
It seems like a huuuuge coincidence that Collin picked the two working ones out of 4.
i doubt it's some kind of firmware security to be honest could be some encryption to make sure original disk has not been switched on board. I mean some can steal laptop and remove chip and use it on another Mac to read its content or to access it, how to secure that scenario?
You are a gift to this world Colin, I discovered you through Luke's channel. Good job.
Amazing work as always, Colin. Always *some* frustration when it comes to doing anything like this on Apple machines. Amazing results though.
Tips:- Once you've removed the underfill, adding a decent flux around the Chips will make de-soldering alot easier with your hot air gun, which I would circle around the entire surface of the chip to melt the solder balls evenly.
Personally I'd use more flux when putting the new chips on so when heating with the hot air again circling the surface of each chip you should see it wiggle as the solder balls melt and surface tension will naturally centralise the chip onto the pads on the board. Remove heat then press down on the centre of the chip (not too hard!) with tweezers and a final re-heat of the chip again circling to ensure the solder balls melt evenly will ensure good contact with the pads :-)
The mixture probably worked because Apple considered what situations they might be restored in the wild: (1) after a system error but with original chips, and (2) by certified Apple techs. (1) will not see blank chips nor chips pre-formatted for a different machine. (2) is an internal process, so they can load the chips they install with a special "It's OK, go ahead and restore" signature that can then be read by the restorer. Your two failed situations with a complete set of pre-formatted chips or two completely blank chips can both be detected by the restorer and then programmed to fail to prevent this sort of thing, but the mixture of a chip from one set and a chip from the other will appear as a corrupt file system and nothing more, i.e. a system error, then you're back in (1) as intended.
I do consider that the two sets didn't work when chip 0 and chip 1 from each set were swapped, however a simple permutation of chips can readily be programmed in software; i.e. if system appears corrupt, swap chip addresses and try again. If chips are soldered pre-programmed in the factory, this would make that process more forgiving. In the end, I'm left wondering: which is more probable, (a) two sets both shipped with one bad chip AND by random chance you chose the only good chip in each set to try, or (b) the placement is not important and Apple is trying to prevent this by detecting it, to the degree that they can without interrupting the intended behavior in normal operation... (b) is far more likely in my mind.
What if the soldering was not good in the first attempts, then he soldered them well in the last attempt?
I also considered this
@@EnricoLorenzoni599, he did solder 4 times. W/o a programmer it remains a guessing game. A bad or missing solder joint would likely get you another error than “can’t format”.
LOL....your operating room table for the reballing is the underside of an old internal DVD player. Absolutely brilliant work!
such a resilient tryout. so excited to see the success finally. very impressive! soul of fun of retrofitting!
Edge of my seat watching, glad it worked in the end.
Amazing work, impressive stuff. It makes me sad seeing all these computers with soldered storage, no reason why Apple don’t just have a standard m.2 slot so users can upgrade as needed. The amount of unnecessary e-waste that will be created when these chips fail since storage can’t be swapped by the user easily. I was going to get a Mac mini but doubt I’ll bother, after ten years in Mac land I’ll go back to a custom PC that I’ll actually own and can upgrade / swap parts as needed. I’ll miss macOS for sure as I love Apple software but their hardware designs and general anti-repair stance are not for me.
That’s why I still use an upgradable 2008 MacBook Pro. It’s running the latest software from 2023 because I used opencore legacy patcher. It’s a hacking tool to run unsupported OS on old computers. It runs great
that looked like a gigantic pain in the ass process. hats off to your patience
This is one impressive work! If you could, I'd love to see list/ links of tools and parts that you are using so I could buy them.
Yeah I've asked for this multiple times I hope he will tell us some day.
In this video, I used: Aoyue 852A++ hot air station, Ksger T12 soldering iron (with J02 tip), Madell QK853 preheater, T2 Mac BGA stencil, Qian-Li underfill removal tool set. Everything can be bought from eBay, Amazon, or AliExpress. NANDs used are "KICM223".
@@dosdude1 thank you very much!! I was postponing my purchases and kept using old stuff until I would find something good and this looks great.
@@dosdude1 as you mentioned in the video, you had to buy another set of NAND that where blank. How can I tell, on the publication, which on is blank?
iPhone iPad?
Just don't. Let everyone know their 2000usd mac is a paperweight within a few years.
About the nand placement issues. You should get a nand programmer. It seems to be impossible to work without it
dosdude and luke miani in-sync upload too! within 1 minute of each other!
Amazing feat! Really enjoyed the genuine excitement when it worked and the level headed reaction on the attempts leading up to success
Cc from Luke's video: That was excruciating to watch! 🤯 Big up to DosDude. Big fan! Let's hope Apple doesn't block these NANDs in future OS updates, ergo "non-genuine Apple parts" 🤞
You're my hero Dosdude1!
Kudos for being persistent and not giving up on the first failed attempt...
Awesome videos, both sides. Can you post a link for the NANDs you’ve bought?
“My Mac Mini is abouddaget juiced” says Luke 😂
Fantastic! How are the new SSDs holding up? What did the smart report show with these new SSD/NANDs? --Also would be fascinated to see a 256 M2 upgraded with the empty 2nd footprint populated
Show me something impressive Collin... And SBAM! Here it is... and I got the mac mini M1... same as this one... gosh!
Perhaps do a full disk write-read test to ensure that the full 2tb is working without error?
your voice is so calm and soothing !!! great work my dude, you just save bros hundreds of dollars per upgrade !!!
Apple: now with ARM M1 and M2 processors with soldered ram, no one can made their own changes
Dosdude: I am INEVITABLE 💀
That's quite a ride. Swapping in and out. Glad it worked at the end. 2TB.. thats so nice.
Incredible. I imagine there could be a huge market for this.
u have some determination! after all that you again bought a new set of blank nands! cheers and good luck!
This might be a stupid question, but has anyone considered creating LGA sockets for NAND chips? This kind of part troubleshooting could be done without constantly soldering/desoldering, and it opens the possibility for future upgrades. Of course, if the pinout/pin positions on the chips are constantly changing it would be a prohibitive effort for the community to undertake.
i did think of that
what i think is that the NAND chips are used in phones as well which if socketed will make them bulky and feature of them is that they are small and not bulky if only pc nand will be socketed then the manufacturer of the chips will need to increase the variety of the chips and i dont think anyone will use it.
its just my opinion, cuz idk the exact functioning of nand chips
Colin's macOS Monterey hack still runs my 2009 white MacBook. Thanks for all you do and for the video!
I remember the days when you could do this with a screwdriver and about 10 minutes time.. The world is bonkers now allowing companies to sell computers like this
Great job Collin
Can you share where we can buy these NAND chips?
I think they need to be pulled off of a donor board as Apple doesn't sell these.
ain't no way... I shouldn't be surprised seeing as you've made huge contributions to the maxc scene
Great video, any chance that you could provide the information of where to get the proper chips?
I think it was a good idea to add that extra solder. If the board wasn't flat enough the existing solder would not be enough to get the whole chips reliably connected. If I ever tried this I would be sure to use the leaded solder that has been used for a long time. I hear the lead free stuff is more brittle, takes more heat to work with and can grow tin whiskers that could cause problems eventually. As much as I like things that are environmentally friendly I think avoiding tin whisker issues would help keep stuff out of landfills. Not only that but lead is not the only metal that is bad for you. Tin can be too! Of course there are elements that are much worse you never want to be around too! It feels like they focused specifically on lead looking for a way to make our electronics unreliable!
Hi! Great video! Can you please share the link to where to buy the blank SSD NAND chips?
Crunchy chips and hot solder my favorite bytes. Well done, not an easy task 👏 👍
There’s plenty of room for these to be removable. The fact apple is doing this isn’t good for their long term survival imho. They should be doing real innovation instead of this nickel and dining users for storage space.
The Apple fanboys will buy whatever they make for their insane prices.
Amazing work!
The nerve racking trial and error approach.
Great troubleshooting done!
Glad it's all working.
Do you ever plan on experimenting with upgrading the soldered RAM on the M series chips?
I had to stop watching this. My heart rate was increasing the longer I watched. It’s not like I’ve not desoldered stuff in the past; it’s just that this has some high value items on the line!
it will be a leap forward if we can upgrade the ram as well.
I love your perseverance! You kept a positive attitude the whole time and just kept at it! Great job!!
I didn't enjoy the video. I'm bursting wity anxiety. I feel so insecure about this. Will my brain transplant hold or will my soul eventually reject it? 🤯😬
There is a lot of empty space inside the Mac mini case. You should consider making a video demonstrating how to add batteries or a 12V input and remove the janky power supply.
If this works then why is Louis Rossman saying that the bios is stored on the NAND chips and thus is the NAND dies you end up with a paperweight? Maybe that's for laptops?
Second question, how do you know the NAND chips are any good?
But Louis is right on this... When it is done for a pay. Imagine having to outsource parts which you aren't 100% sure will work, then doing all the work, just to fail and having to buy new parts, while customer is freaking you he/she needs the Mac "NOW". In fact, he had to outsource a new set of "blank" NANDs to keep testing, so it wasn't only 180 bucks in parts.
This is only fine as experiment or some home project for Yt, where you can borrow tools from your real job, and with enough money from the platform to buy extra parts to "play with". But if you want to do this as job, you will hit a wall pretty fast. And we don't know how hard this will keep getting in the future. New NANDs are coming with an array of blank eFuses for a reason, you know. Some comments here are right. Is better to just stop feeding the problem. Let Apple and their devices to crack down and better focus in making alternative brands to work.
@@hyoenmadan I don't disagree, but this coming from a career PC / Laptop guy, I'm going to get the M3. My just as extensive XPS only lasted 4 years, that's only with extended Dell warranty otherwise it would have been less so.
Windows performance is crap after you unplug from power.
I really like the idea of long battery life and the same level of performance plugged in or otherwise. Although in time I may just install Asahi Linux if I can get the same level of performance and battery as with mac OS. So unfortunately I'm feeding the problem...
@@affieuk If you will gonna install linux on that mac, you may buy a second sourced one instead. Also don't forget to support alternative brands. Like I said, don't feed the problem.
The soldering of SSD on the mainboard is just criminal and i hope an EU law will soon forbid this (just like the did for non replaceable battiers). It is against consumer interest and a terrible anti durability in times where we need to inspect every single bit of our ecological food print. Apple uses the lowest possible memory (ram/ssd) so there is a good reason to update, because the computer devices could work well for well for 10 and more years now.
Soldered batteries havent been a thing for a while. All batteries are replacable, it's just the amount of work a person has to do to actually replace them that has grown.
I’m speechless. You can really charm the Macs. 👍
I find it ridiculous that you can't even upgrade SSDs on modern Macs without some serious soldering skills. When it fails, you're essentially left with e-waste.
Except of course the new Mac Pro, where the SSDs are user replaceable... Which only confirms that Apple could've used the same solution in Mac Minis and Macbooks, but they chose not to. Because why would users want to replace a broken SSD when they can simply buy a new Mac... right?
Corect. I think nvidia's ceo said it best: the more you buy the more you save.
All of the 8gb ram M1 models are gonna need this treatment in a couple of years. It’s gonna be a booming market, as long as you can still get the right spec chips for the boards
The takeaway from all this is: don't waste your money on Apple products because they are 1) terribly difficult to upgrade, and 2) engineered by Apple to be thrown away.
Very cool to see this colab, also it's crazy to see that storage upgrade, congratulations!
I feel you guys missed an opportunity to say "it's alive!!!!1".
Do ram next! 😁
Amazing video...Use one pre-programmed and one blank and it will work. Great. Also when you tried to install firmware on both i think it may have also preprogrammed it to a degree and when you mixed the two it fooled the system thinking that it was legit Apple soldered nano ssd. I've done this before on an Air that had soldered memory on it and it worked. :). Great to see it works on Mini as well. Great Reballing skills and taking the oem nans off..So hard to not destroy pads sometimes. Hardest part.. reballing is hard too sometime if you use too much. Great Job. Amazing share. :) Subscribed. Northridgefix is my main soldering guy...i just saved you as #2. Of course I love Louis from NYC the Mac Genius but he repairs them mostly doesn't upgrade last time i checked. Right to repair is a dream. Lets make it happen. Manifest that.
Louis has moved to TX some time ago.
it would be nice if you put the entire process so others can do it , i would love to increase my 512 to 2 tb 😜
So at work I have access to an ERSA 600XL and it just made me realize I can do this upgrade to my mac in 20 minutes. I should film it. what you do takes skill though man great stuff. My way is pay 2 win.
Glad people here in the States are finally doing this upgrade. Been watching videos of Chinese doing this upgrade for the last couple years. Obviously it's much easier for them to source the chips in China.
Collin you are amazing brother, lot's of love from India, I have watched both videos and saw all the suspension.
Great video and what a ride! I don't even have a mac mini but when it finally shows the Apple logo on the monitor I cheered lol
congrats on another crazy mod. This mod has unlocked better understanding about the newer macs and newer questions to possibilities of ram or vram mods. keep up the good work🎉
Saw your " underground supershop " at Luke Miami video .
Its supercool 🎉
Awesome test, thank u for sharing this vid!👍It would be great to find out what was really behind restore failures and why that particular combination of chips worked. I would say none of those 2 chips in the second try were blank from manufacturing as Aliexpress is full of scammers and liars, however it would great to test it with real blank chips. Honestly I wasn't expecting it will work because of the Apple's secure enclave in the chip... this is teaching people to continue to try and not give up.
Hands of a surgeon, man. Great respect and great job!
Love this! Someday I can upgrade my M1 iMac. Thank you for your hard work.
Just works, but only took three tries and mixing and matching :\ . Very cool to see that NAND upgrades and replacements are possible on these. It's silly to solder the storage onto the board however!
Wow, that's actually amazing! But sheer amount of randomness in this process makes it risky as hell.
Congratulations on this upgrade 🎉
The harmonics in your voice 👌
Mac and Apple people are soo good :) they so happy to upgrade their own PC storage :D
I've seen people do this before and that's exact reason why I didn't work at their end this is why I'm bringing it up to you I signed another TH-cam video where they were able to do this perfectly fine but they had the same problem that you're having as soon as they plugged in a monitor and tried tried it work fine The mad many recognizes all devices that are connected onto it especially during a software install so you have to have a monitor installed it's like taking a part an iPhone replacing the battery and then expecting it to power up just by hitting power button without plugging it in
What a cliffhanger! By 23:00 I was really starting to doubt whether this would have a happy end.
Just shows how far Apple is willing to go sacrificing user friendliness to the financial interests of their shareholders. In a desktop system there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to use soldered nand instead of an m2 ssd.
And you want to keep that device for ever?
Maybe you need a monitor, the foot stand it's only 999,99 and no, monitor comes without one included.
Jokes aside, wait until Apple will implement USB-C on phones, will work only with Apple cable, cost around 90 bux for a goddamn usb-c cable