Apple's soldered-in SSDs are engineered in the worst way possible

hey everybody how's it going hope you're having a lovely day today I'm going to rant on the fact that soldering ssds are a Cancer upon Computing and why I think it is a bad idea that this was ever implemented in a smartphone you really need this thing to be ultra thin it fits in your pocket I understand the idea of soldering on the main storage particularly since a smartphone on average is just not a device where you're going to be expecting to have 50 or 70 terabytes of ride Cycles like you would to I don't know a computer that's designed to be used for a high-end video editing in graphics and video production and everything else if you have a computer that isn't marketed to people as something that is going to be used in this way you should expect that it's going to get a lot of right Cycles to it in the way that a smartphone won't which means that it may die further since the computer costs a lot more than a smartphone having to replace the entire thing because the SSD died is far more offensive in a three thousand or four thousand dollar computer than it is on a five or six hundred dollar smartphone a SSD the solid state drive the nand is aware of part it's not the same as Ram or a CPU again you can expect the CPU to keep on being Trucking along for 20 or 30 years sometimes Ram can keep trucking along for 20 to 30 years and SSD that you're writing to regularly it really is more of a rare part that you can expect if you're writing to it every single day a lot for five years you've used up a good portion of that's life if not the entirety of its life depending on the quality of the parts used and how much writing you are actually doing to it so soldering in that part versus using an m.2 SSD which is very very slim and allows you to build a really really thin computer compared to what you could build 15 or 20 years ago at storage technology in my opinion it's just a cry and shame now one of the problems that I have with the way these machines are designed particularly the a1990 and a2141 is they're designed in this way where when the nand fails when the SSD fails you have a paperweight with the a1706 and a1707 if the SSD failed whatever fine you get a question mark folder you hold down the option key you boot into your Ubuntu Live CD or you boot into a backup you made a clone you made of your drives so you can have a external SSD USBC this add a connection and you can just boot into the Clone that you made of the drive that was on your device so you still can boot into the Mac operating system you can still do your work yeah you're gonna look kind of stupid with an SSD duct tape to the back of your monitor of your laptop but you could still work with these newer ones it's very interesting because the way it works the way the t2 and all the boot up [ __ ] Works essentially it needs the nand to actually function if the Nan doesn't function it's not going to complete the boot up process properly and it's going to do weird stuff it may boot up for 20 to 40 seconds and then turn off or my personal favorite is when the nand fails by shorting to ground many of these fail by shorting to ground entirely not just like a dead SSD with a data when poof I mean where the actual Nan chips fail and bring down the power line completely because there is a six to zero ohm short to ground on the Nan's main power line when this happens the main power line of the computer is also short at the ground because the main power line of the computer is directly powering the 2.5 volt line that powers the SSD which means that you have a computer that you literally can't even turn on anymore when your SSD fails your computer doesn't turn on again it's one thing to have a computer where the SSD fails you lost your data you have to duct tape an SSD to the back of your computer like a dinkist have a laptop that works again so you could use an SSD externally but to have it where it shorts the ground and when it shorts the ground the machine doesn't even turn off power to that rail it can't even detect oh there's a zero ohm short there how about we cut that off so the rest of the computer can work no we don't have any of that so you have a computer that is essentially a door stop a three thousand dollar device that is now a doorstop now many of you may ask well Louis you have fancy soldering equipment here what's the point of having a hot air station and all the stuff and all these employees and all these parts and everything if you're not able to replace the SSD you're not a real repairman it's kind of late at night so my analogy is maybe failing me at the moment but I want you to imagine it like the difference between a jacket and underwear if it's really cold outside if you weren't expecting it to be 20 degrees because it was 70 yesterday kind of typical to the some of the weather in this part of the country sometimes if you weren't expecting it to be 20 degrees and your friend says you know you can borrow my jacket I haven't watched it in a week but you can borrow my jacket a lot of people would be okay with that so that they could walk outside however if your friend says oh you know you can borrow my underwear you can borrow my my boxers I haven't washed them in a week you're probably not going to borrow them some parts are Parts where I have absolutely no problem grabbing them off a donor board an ISL 6259 fine grabbing it off a donor board a backlight chip fine grabbing that off a donor board Anand I'm not a 2011 MacBook Pro with a GPU no because that that really is more of a rare part on an a202915 board that GPU is kind of a rare part it's going to be dead after a few years if 91 year and when it gets hot over and over and over again it's one of those things where I just cannot trust that it's going to work very long going forward an LED backlit screen yeah I'll reuse a used one a fluorescent backlit screen from 2008. no I'm not going to reuse that because that fluorescent backlight has a finite lifespan that is much more finite than many of the other components I'm not going to go over to a donor board where I don't know the history of it I don't know why that board is here I don't know why it's dead and grab the nands off of that that may have had 70 terabytes of ride Cycles to them and placed those in a customer's board those are the same nands that suck so much that they're failing to this extent to begin with where over 50 of our h2141 16-inch MacBook Pro repairs are devices with an SSD short of the ground that's just not a repair that I feel comfortable doing I'm it's essentially not only is there a lot of work involved I need to take the nands off of the donor board after you know getting rid of all the underfill re-ball them take the nands off of the customary board get rid of the underfill properly and solder it on just so that the customer can have a device with nands on it that may very well last like three or four months I I don't feel comfortable with that I wouldn't feel good offering that I want to feel when every time somebody leaves here even if it looks like a janky repair even if you got wires going everywhere I want to feel like this is a work that when I'm in my retirement home this machine is still going to be booting kind of thing I want to have that pride in what I do I don't feel that level of Pride when I'm taking nands off of a donor that probably have 40 terabytes of write Cycles and putting it on your computer so these machines essentially wind up becoming junk and I I think the thing that's most important to go over here is that it's a choice to engineer it this way it's a choice to solder the SSD onto the board it's a choice to set up the machine in a manner where when that soldered on SSD fails rather than just having a device without an SSD you have a dead computer and I'm hoping that as time goes on and as more people purchase these products and have these experiences that they start to become a little bit more Discerning and critical when purchasing these devices for manufacturers if a device has a solder on SSD it would be really cool if customers started to say you know what nah I got screwed by that once not doing that again and I think it's really important for us to tell our customers that that's the case that if you bought virtually any other device you would be fine I would be taking out an m2ssd that cost 50 bucks putting one in that costs like 100 bucks and Bam you have twice the storage it's faster It's amazing And if anything goes wrong you know just do the same thing again a few years from now but I'm not because you bought a MacBook because you bought a MacBook maybe if we do these things things will change maybe consumers will start making different decisions maybe Apple will start making different design decisions and maybe I'll move back to New York City and start a business there again then maybe it'll rain gold in my backyard well that being said figured you'd enjoy some footage of me torturing myself for about an hour I'll edit it up and you tell me is your next machine going to be a machine with a solder and SSD let me know hey everybody how's it going I hope you're having a lovely day today we're going to be looking at a Macbook that doesn't turn on we're going to see if we can fix it this over here is an a 21 41 MacBook 99 of the time when this MacBook doesn't turn on it has a dead SSD and hopefully that's not the case today it does 0.001 0.09 0.01 actually 0.1 okay 2 M's for a quick second oh the fan just spun the fan just spun was this sleeping does this turn on already oh let's see this again oh this is actually probably going to be really shitty something tells me this is going to be really shitty like turns on and then turns off turns on and then turns off turns on and then turns off yeah okay this is gonna be [ __ ] the funniest part of LTX for me was there was this one person that was pretending they watched my content I forget if it was one of the sponsors of the show or something like one of the people with a booth and like I had a Creator bed I was like hey I watch like oh yeah I love your stuff and I go oh oh cool and he's like yeah what's your channel and I'm like really like you're gonna be that transparent like I love your stuff that I don't even watch because I don't even know your channel like fine [ __ ] it I tell my channel again we're just trying to get some of our stuff into the hands of creators to go over and and like then like I could see the first video that showed up when he searched for me was like purism scams customers this company scams customers and it just kept going on and on and on like that and he's like oh you know what never mind I don't think yeah yeah never mind it was just so funny watching his face change from like this happiness of I'm going to get this YouTuber to like talk about our stuff to oh actually yeah whoopsie as grade A under a would have said in 2015. [ __ ] off mate otherwise I enjoyed my time there it was a worthwhile conference if you are able to go at some points in the future I suggest you give it a shot but oh man that was a funny one it's like Yeah The Advertiser friendly YouTubers are that way this is the autistic nerd section okay I'm literally going to take this board out I'm going to look at the other side and if there's nothing obviously physically damaged and it is boot looping I am then going to try booting it with nothing attached besides the screen and the charge port and if it's still boot Loops then this can s my d again if you wanted if you wanted to do diode on measurements on all the PCI Express lines and compare it to a known good and bloody bloody bloody bloody blah there's yeah but technically technically you could do all that stuff to then get a 50 50 understanding of whether the CPU or the GPU is bad that you have to transfer off of a donor board that's probably going to be in the donor pile because it has a dead CPU or GPU we're not going to do that tonight I really just kind of want to work out the Kingston eye streaming setup I'm not actually expecting to fix anything or do anything fun so if you're if you're looking for something fun this is not going to be the stream for you I mainly just want to see that my streaming setup Works see if anything breaks make sure I have all the things on my desk that I would need in order to feel like I have a functioning desk by the way everybody we have board repair we have board repair royalty in the chat today I want everybody to say a good hello to Mr Paul Daniels Paul Daniels come on down all right so we saw some corrosion by the SSD Buck but there's always corrosion by the SSD book it wouldn't be a 2141 without corrosion by the SSD buck but you know what you might just give that a little bit of love you might just give that a little bit of love I'm just going to look over the rest of the board and remember I'm counting on you people to tell me if you see anything wrong Paul Daniels the software guy yeah Paul Daniels the elite programmer make no mistake Mr Paul Daniels is an elite coder okay so the only thing I see on this board that's funky is this this is the thing that's always funky on this board do you see what it is that I'm pointing to you see that yeah that that's that is a nasty cap so we have a nasty Gap SSD buck and we got some nasty corrosion over here so it's blue looping it's boot looping and let's see if we can take a look at the schematic in the board View and get an idea what that is by the way for anybody curious about what software I'm using this is flex board View this is flex boardview and I'm using version Point eleven fifty God only knows how old that is but it's it works so that's that's that we use the software that works and the software that works is yeah so this is a capacitor on PP 25 nand SSD so this is going to be for powering the SSD so if this capacitor is mildly short it's a ground or fully shortage of the ground it would keep power from going to the SSD and then you also have corrosion over here and over here this is going to be for a resistor over here it looks like feedback or this is going to be responsible over here so the whole idea here is this Chip is going to take 12 or 13 volts and turn it to 2.5 for the SSD now it has to switch back and forth like it's beyond and off and on and off and on and off because the way this is going to work is it's not just going to magically take 12 volts and turn it into two and a half what it does is it just sends a little bit of 12 a lot of zero a little bit of 12 a lot of zero a little bit of 12 a lot of zero and it kind of averages its way out to two and a half but it has to see is it turning on to little 12 or too much 12. let's see what what is being done in output and that's going to happen through feedback over here now if these resistors are in improper value then this little voltage divider over here that's leading to feedback might give the wrong amount and it may either be making too much voltage or too little voltage compared to what it should be so it says over here that these resistor this resistor that is right by the corroded area actually it doesn't look like the resistor is really the corroded area it looks like if we're being honest with ourselves here that it's this bottom capacitor but that cap doesn't even necessarily look bad it doesn't look dead it just looks like it has corrosion in the area that may be adding some capacitive crosstalk or some [ __ ] like that that is yeah it's a fancy way to say it's corroded so let's just let's just remove it and put something that's not corroded in that area now if this chip over here that is the one that powers the SSD this is a TPS 62180 this is u9580 if you click the PDF button on Paul Daniels amazing software it'll actually find that on the PDF view just like that isn't that beautiful and if you wanted one of these chips one of the things that you could do if you wanted to find it is you could go to store.rossman group.com and unlike the Beats Tech that doesn't have it in stock store.rossman group.com does have it in stock so you're out of stock and you cost 31 more cents but where in stock that's right and of course we don't have a picture because [ __ ] if I've updated my website in three years not like anybody buys from this thing anyway okay so what I'm going to do is I'm going to remove the tps62180 I'm going to remove the nasty capacitors for feedback and remove the nasty filtering cap on the line and once that's completed I'm going to replace them with a happier one a superior one a better one and since the component that I'll be putting on the board will be a happier component that's also just happens to not be liquid damaged it's actually going to work better because happier components work better it's one of the important things that they don't tell you in school you got it really fast over here because you're right next to an SSD you don't want to heat that [ __ ] up now that capacitor that had the Schmutz inherent I think I can get away with leaving that on there the TPS actually managed to not have any corrosion under it so replacing this may be maybe silly what's wrong with this board you'll it boot loops F Jack audio for being a buggy be a Heil of [ __ ] and we're back we're back yes all right so the stream died uh Jack audio died I used the studio thing sometimes turning it off and back on again will fix it and sometimes that doesn't and you this is one of the times where that doesn't fix it such is life such is life it is Linux expecting things to work in Linux for any sort of audio video production is being silly I'm a crazy man I am an anti-establishment I want to do things my own way blah blah blah and this is what you get you get owned you get absolutely owned Okay so we're back hello Amanda how are you we're gonna take a donor Camp my donor board put it on this one now I'm not putting a lot of heat on that and you may say Hey you know that that's not sold it on right why are you not doing more well I have to use heat to solder this BGA chip on there and I want to limit the amount of heat that I applied to this section of the board because the nand is right above it and I don't want to overheat that so if I'm going to limit the amount of heat that I'm using that's going to fly into place just fine as is yeah I have my heat turned down my air turned down now we're going to implement rapid cool started swimming more recently so I got more lung capacity you know so when I blow on the board it's not booting okay where's the operating system in that stuff store the SSD what is the part that powers the SSD look like looks like corroded [ __ ] okay you know you got to make some sense of things first before you just go around restoring and deleting people's [ __ ] not trying to be an Apple store here when devotes 30 milliamps 100 milliamps 70 milliamps 1.3 amps 1.7 amps 2 amps okay we're singing a song we're singing a song that looks like attempt to boot this is a song that seems like attempt at booting the fan stays on does it stay on longer than before am I tricking myself I have a feeling that I'm fooling myself I'm telling myself the fan is staying on longer this time when in reality it is not but it is it's still on one amp this fan is still on you're doing something you're doing something you weren't doing before yeah you see this is pretty much the same behavior as before okay so let's think about it and then the fan turns off so the fan stays on about 20 seconds and then the fan turns off so let's think about this from a logical standpoint what could cause the machine to have the fan turn on and then turn off it's like it stays on for about 45 seconds and then it boot loops and the only thing that we notice on the computer is that there was some strangeness there was some weirdness on the SSD Buck converter which we have removed the corrosion from what would you say is the problem at that point no not that right makes the post and gets to the point that something is dead and restarts Don't Say No I said that's [ __ ] up don't wish that on me OS boo Drive yeah okay so tomorrow we're just gonna pretend that that resistance number isn't an issue and I'm going to grab a Macbook and I'm going to do a dfu revive and this is going to work just fine it's gonna work just fine you shut your mouth it's gonna work I want to hear any of your [ __ ] if I had a Macbook you'd see that this SSD is just fine and if I were to keep those probes there for the next three hours I would get kilo ohms of resistance instead of a hundred something on 2.5 Nan this wasn't a full zero arm short though Paul Daniels There's Hope are you telling me there's a chance so you're saying there's a chance today we're going to be looking at an a1990 MacBook that doesn't turn on and we're going to see if we can fix it hopefully this is more fixable than the a2141 that can anybody guess what was wrong with that one kind of curious how good you all are at guessing things because if you were going to guess that that had a dead SSD you'd probably be right but this is the second machine this is not going to be like that horrible first machine let's see what we get so I'm going to switch over to my overhead camera over here which could use just a little bit of adjustment so what do we have here so this machine looks like it is at come on 20 volts 160 milliamps so let's take this board out of the case and see if we can figure out what's wrong with it anybody here have a guess on what's wrong with my with my machine all gases are welcome it is an apple that is the first problem but we cannot be we can't be prejudiced against this because of how it was born it didn't choose to be born a MacBook try to avoid being prejudiced against something for what it was born as be prejudiced against it for what it chooses to be I don't give a [ __ ] about Twitter what I'm pissed off about is some of the news websites that I read that used to report on actual news now I have like Twitter on the front page like Twitter didn't pay their office for oh [ __ ] Twitter's API I don't give a [ __ ] what I'm what I'm trying to read about foreign policy or financial things I don't give a [ __ ] about Elon musk's Pet Project or cries for attention block and I move on that place is amazing if any of you ever come to Austin there's a Lebanese restaurant called kabobsy Mediterranean Grill it's somewhere around 29th or 30th Street in Guadalupe oh my God the people that say that you have to be in New York City to get good food really just you're they're missing out so bad there are so many parts of the country that have absolutely amazing food Austin's got some pretty nice stuff this is one place are pitas and Round Rock the Venice it's Venezuelan restaurant but everything there is amazing there is kebabsy Grill uh that's that is Lebanese food which is pretty cool now and then there can be douchebags that are sitting there like there was this really really old conservative group sitting there and it was funny because they were like talking and they were talking in Arabic and they didn't realize that my girlfriend understands it and they said something along the lines of like the pantries wearing the tight pants she's wearing over and over again and they started coughing and laughing to each other and I didn't realize like why she was giving this people the deaths there and she tells me outside that they were uh like they were going over ew why is there a bug in here and they were like you know go ranting on about her clothes and laughing and blah blah blah so I said okay just give me one second what are you doing I said just just one moment I walked in before we left and I said you know just can you just do me one favor like if you're gonna talk about it just do it in English so that we can both so we can all enjoy it like heck what do you mean what do you mean I'm like I know what you said [ __ ] sit down like just just do it in English so that I can hear it as well just do it in English it'll be a much more fun conversation oh man but ever but in spite of that sometimes there are dicks that sit there and I get it like you know it's a old Lebanese restaurant that attacks it attracts like kind of like oldish sometimes conservative like really conservative old world people really all Italians can be like that too like I remember my grandma used to smack my my dad and my grandpa on the head if he was watching The Honeymooners and he was laughing so if he was laughing watching the honeymoon she used to go next life is for laughing this life is for God but she was she was serious she wasn't [ __ ] with him like next life is for laughing this life is for God it's like dude he's watching The Honeymooners he's a bricklayer my grandpa sat down after like every single day working 12 to 13 hours in the 1960s 70s and 80s laying [ __ ] bricks all day he just wanted to laugh at The Honeymooners before dying in his like 50s of a artery issue and it's something with like old world that old world mentality in general it's like oh my God look at the pants that person is wearing it's like dude it's like they're gym tights like relax relax relax okay so the first thing you notice here is that this board is insanely Dusty and we can't really do much to it until we fix the dust the other thing is I said I couldn't reach the button to adjust the white balance in this camera but I'm gonna go and I'm gonna stand on the chair a little bit and try because this is actually triggering okay a little bit better I'll adjust it more and [ __ ] with it later that is PP bus you're correct PBS being 20 I know I'm still it's kind of [ __ ] oh [ __ ] you okay six ohms okay you're you're right Paul you're right I was measuring the wrong spot that was dumb that was dumb okay so when I measure fresh on the for the right SSD I have 6.4 ohms but what's more important is that I have 6.4 ohms with nothing that looks bad like this this area is clean I had like the Teeny tiniest little bit of dust on PP bus with a Green Dot that barely even qualified as corrosion which means that Paul Daniels has not called a dead SSD on one board he is called a dead SSD on two boards that's not cool that's not fair okay so here's the thing this is not a 2141 this is not a 2141 so there's hope in spite of Paul Daniels there is hope and we are not going to give up hope okay so let's go over what we're gonna do here because [ __ ] Paul Daniels here's what we're gonna do so we have six ohms now the six ohms could be on this side which is the SSD side or it could be on the chip side if it's on the chip side I could just replace that with a chip that's in the other room over there it's on the SSD side I'm probably [ __ ] because all these capacitors look fine and not all I didn't look at all but you get the idea so if I take off l9080 and l9081 this is kind of like the bridge so right now I don't know if this is short as a ground to this because I'm measuring all of it if I take off this this is the bridge between here and here so if I take off these two inductors then what I'm measuring I can actually see is this side towards the ground or is this side shortage of ground so that's what I'm going to do I'm going to remove that section I'm going to remove those two and we're going to show you that Paul Daniels is wrong [ __ ] Paul Daniels we're going to show you that he is not correct he is not going to sabotage me from ever having a working board repair Again by having me have nothing other than dead nand it's a yeah it's a 10 Ohm resistor I guess yeah it's a 10 Ohm resistor man not ex not amused if you're one of those four caps up top oh man oh man oh son of a hoe do you okay do you see what I see damn look at all the solder balls but those aren't the SSD caps oh wait that's ppov9 SSD so why would those caps be bad as well as the others see this leads me to believe it's not it's not okay so two power rails responsible for SSD power are shorted probably okay so there's two different there's two different rails for SSD power that have a problem one of them has a 6 ohm short to ground the second one has solder balls sticking out of its capacitors what do the 0.9 volt Rail and the two point five volt rail have in common they're both powering the net so it's more likely here that the nand is what's bad because the nand is what the is in common between these two things so if it was just the nand power rail that was bad that wouldn't explain why the 0.9 volt rail has this around it as well the 0.9 volt rails with power is one of the two rails that powers the SSD here we have the 2.5 and the 0.9 if the 0.9 volt rail has all these little solder balls moving around that means that most likely the nand is shorted and it is placing a lot of tension on all of the power rails that are powering the SSD which is why there's solder balls there which [ __ ] my life um we're still going to remove these these inductors and perhaps that resistor just to confirm that I'm [ __ ] just to confirm this is sad this is actually [ __ ] sad [ __ ] me you know we don't get to have easy ones here do we all right that's sad that you consider that standard manufacturing balling because that's some [ __ ] build quality right there move [ __ ] get off the board okay now what do you think we're gonna find when we measure see if there's a short circuit okay so I'm going to put the black Probe on ground and the red probe is going to go over here on the SF fock and here oh so the SSD side is your ohms are these MacBooks from random Q now these are cherry-picked this is actually okay so I think I know what happened you can always replace the ssdic yeah I mean if you're okay selling the customer that their data is gone and you're okay spending a bunch of money on the a donor board that has them that's going to have chips that have 50 terabytes of ride cycles and spending an hour or two on it no LTX was the right one got to meet the CEO of framework it's a pretty cool dude I got to meet his marketing team and I enjoyed asking how they Market things because I got to learn something since I don't um I wasn't really aware of what they were doing with marketing they have the marketing team there that was fun to shoot the [ __ ] with them thank you very much Juan thank you now you know if this wasn't a Macbook what you would do if your SSD died you know what you would do you would buy a new one and you would unplug the SSD from your current one but this is a MacBook

Channel: Louis Rossmann

Views: 515,592

Keywords: macbook, logic board repair, a2141, a1990, soldered in SSD, macbook pro, macbook pro 16, macbook ssd, macbook repairr

Id: 0qbrLiGY4Cg

Length: 33min 32sec (2012 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 04 2023