UPGRADING an M1 Mac mini SSD from 256gb to 2TB!!

the transition to Apple silicon has no doubt been one of the most transformative things to ever happen at a tech company but that's not without some drawbacks Apple silicon is undoubtedly King in terms of performance per watt cooling efficiency and thermal performance but the new Max with apple silicon are backtracking in a number of ways the most significant of which is repairability and upgradeability apple silicon is entirely SOC based which completely eliminates any upgradable or removable components take my M1 Mac Mini for example I bought this thing at launch in November 2020 and it's the base model which means I've only got 256 gigabytes of storage and quite frankly that's not enough unfortunately I'm not the only one who thinks that because Colin AKA dos dude AKA an absolute technology Mastermind said Hey what if things don't have to be like this so today we are going to take my M1 Mac Mini and upgrade it to the max literally we're gonna go from the base 256 gigabytes of storage all the way to two terabytes let's get into it after this message from today's video sponsor today's video is sponsored by acorns the easy saving and investing app that gives you access and knowledge to build your future acorns helps you save and invest for your future with portfolios that are Diversified by acorns customized by you and they make things super easy with automated saving and investing starting with spare change now with the ability to pick individual stocks for your Diversified portfolio acorns keeps the foundation of your base portfolio Diversified for the long term just like they always do and Beyond helping you invest you can get tools and guidance along the way to learn about investing access premium education including expert-led bite size courses interactive quizzes videos and more so whether you want to use acorns to round up your purchases to save spare change invest in Diversified portfolios or gain extra knowledge to help you enter the world of investing and savings acorns is here for you head to the link in my description and download acorns to start saving and investing for your future today big thanks to acorns for sponsoring and now let's get back to the video guys we are in the Dos do dungeon and today's project is the Mac Mini these are two one terabyte nand chips so each one is one terabyte so as far as I'm aware this is not the first time that something like this has been done I don't know if someone went from like 256 to 2 terabytes but we're going to show you the step-by-step on how this process works and if you want a even more detailed explanation Colin's got a video that will be linked in the description below going through this step by step I do love how easy it is to take these things apart It's a grand total I think of 13 screws in this Mac Mini we got to take the heatsink the fun very good little speaker has to come out and you don't want to melt literally anything that's made of plastic any Plastics um and anything that you can remove you should remove because you know the less that gets heat on it the better the nand chips have what's called underfill under them you can see this it's like this what wasn't injected under them as a liquid but it's it gets to a point where it's like rock solid and hard and it is pretty difficult to cleanly remove these without like damaging them or the board so the big challenge is right next to the board they're these tiny tiny little resistors and they're actually in the underfill so yes we don't want to pull those off of the board when we take these chips off yeah so if you don't fully separate the underfill right where those resistors are and you lift the chip it will pull those resistors off with it because they'll be obviously they're so close that the solder on them will be molten as well all right well I guess at this point we're pretty much ready to go here uh a little nervous but me too I've practiced a few times so we should be okay step two is we have to use a special underfell tool which looks like this it's actually double Blended which is pretty cool but this side with this little hook attachment I use for scraping the under fill around the sides and between the components here and then this side you actually have to stick underneath the chip while you're heating it and like slide it under and then like like push it up oh that scares me so with that I'm just going to turn on uh the hot air I'm probably going to turn it to around 280 to 300 degrees you do not want to go too hot on this or you will damage either the nands not that it's a big deal in this case or the board and you do not want to go too deep with this tool or with too much force or you will scrape away the solder mask which you obviously don't all right yeah that's not good all right so at this point I think it's well enough separated now from the outside edges especially these two little resistors right here that we can now begin the process of actually removing it and then get this tool underneath the chip to pry it off that's oh yeah it's definitely starting we're up to 350 C now yeah I don't think I'm gonna go much higher than that some people say they go to like 400 Degrees that's a lot which is a little scary to me that's a little frightening we're up to 379 380. come on this is very stressful to watch it's very stressful to do too well that I imagine is probably true something oh dang there it is holy moly that was terrifying and our components are still good here yeah looks like those little resistors did not lift which is that is huge news yes it's very good all right so let's move on to chip number two oh look at that beautiful all right the next step is to clean off all of this residual underfill and it'll also clean off some of this residual solder as well and once the board is up to solder melting temperatures we can take this tool and just kind of scrape the underfill off all right and that looks pretty good there so the last thing I'm going to do is clean it with some rubbing alcohol and a paper towel just to get all that flux off of there and then we'll take a look and make sure everything looks good I'm sorry do you use an optical drive as your reball platform yes I've used this for literal years too as you can see this one matches up with the nand footprint are those all Apple chip Footprints this is for a T2 Max so that's what that plug that oh you're right here that's so cool and now that the nand has been applied to the stencil we're just going to use some solder paste to re-ball this one we're just going to take this tool and press it down into all these holes and now with the solder paste in those holes we're just going to use the hot air to melt it onto the pads all right and that looks really good the solder balls definitely have a lot more height to them now which will make certain that it fully solders to the board um so to get started I'm just going to turn on my hot air to about 300 degrees with that warming up we'll just apply flux to all the pads and then we will simply take our new nand chips that we just finished reboiling a line pin one to this top Corner closest to the SOC and then we'll simply heat them and solder them onto the board and there we go simple as that wow soldered onto the board so definitely a lot easier going on than coming off yes now it's time to reassemble the machine and hopefully we can use Apple configurator 2 to get this machine dfu restored foreign [Music] so let's just plug it in and see what happens I guess oh yeah the the flashing light means it's trying to boot my heart is beating this is the intense part I know Apple makes it so hard to do anything with storage these days even in the Mac Studio which we all know is modular okay we got the Mac Mini in dfu mode you can see the light is Amber 13.96 gigabytes now I should note here I'm specifically using Big Sur because later versions of apple configurator and correspondingly later versions of Mac OS ipsws apparently will not allow you to restore a machine with blank or unprogrammed nands or wrong nands fingers crossed do we have a plan B no cool it either works sir it doesn't that's not scary at all and in theory all we need to do is drag it over to here and it should restore it for us all right so I guess I'm just going to wait for this I don't have a monitor hooked up to the Mac Mini because I don't have a second one to hook up right here but uh we're just gonna hope it's working and all right what's the what's your over under oh what are the odds I don't even know at this point honestly like I just I don't know it's it's moving it's moving like it's doing stuff yeah yeah this is a good this is a good song this is good no What fail to handle no no not the nand oh is it back in dfu no it's flashing amber oh that's angry trying Monterey now no same thing with failures in both Mac OS Big Sur and Monterey we even tried Ventura with the latest version of system configurator and we got the same result yeah there it is Apple you're really pissing me off right now look we just want to upgrade a Mac Mini from a quarter terabyte to two terabytes is that too much to ask apparently so but we do have one final idea and that is to switch the nand chips I did some research on the Mac room as forms and it seems like with two terabytes especially people have done this with the Max studio said that the order of the Nan chips was important so we don't know which order these were supposed to be in but there's only one other option so we're gonna swap the chips all right chip swap in three two one nice there they are that worked the funny thing is we're in a situation now where if this doesn't work I'm gonna cry and if this does work it's the stupidest thing I've ever heard it's not looking any different than it did before not yet which is not a good sign well we haven't gotten to that point yet I only want one thing in this life and that is a two terabyte Mac Mini it has to be custom done not yes not a purchased two terabyte magazine what no way no God damn it I really thought we were getting somewhere I really thought this time would be different hey it's me studio Luke uh here to interrupt with some context basically apple and their firmware is extremely particular when you try to mess with it that's why you can't swap the touch ID sensor between logic boards and that's why if you try to replace a screen on many MacBooks true tone won't work they just love to stick serialized little chips and stuff to pair everything together and make sure that you can't replace stuff easily and that's exactly what happened to us you obviously cannot buy completely brand new Apple nand chips from Apple that are certified to work but somewhere along the way whether it was a mistake that we made or an intentional feature of Hardware pairing those chips they're just not gonna work but fortunately Colin is a very Intrepid fellow and a couple weeks later we were back in business okay I'm back in the Dos do dungeon it's been a couple of weeks and quite a lot has happened would you like to explain Colin yeah so uh at the end of the day I ended up having to get a new set of nands and we still haven't tested them at this point so I'm not sure if they're gonna work uh but these nands are instead of being pre-programmed like those initial nands that I had gotten in the first half of this video these nands were sold as being brand new blank Nan so no firmware no programming on them and the ironic part is that these chips were actually cheaper than what we did initially so I think it was what four hundred dollars for the first time so 180 for the program set that we initially got gotcha and these came out to about a hundred dollars total for both chips so okay this works it's it's less risky because you're not buying chips that were scavenged from a machine they're blank yeah and they're like almost half the price yeah so if this works this makes this upgrade even more worth doing so that'll be like could you imagine 100 dollars to take your Mac Mini to two terabytes I shouldn't get my hopes up here let's let's try it out first but now I've got this rigged up with the iMac right up to a Mac Mini classic yeah this is another M1 Mac Mini and this machine is fully updated with the latest version of Mac OS Ventura the latest Apple configurator definitely a perfectly normal and not at all modified Mac Mini yes the speaker's quite loud when it's not inside the aluminum case I know so this time I've also got a different cable set up here I've got a USBC to USB 3 plugged into one of the USB a ports on the other M1 Mac Mini so now we just need to connect power put this machine in dfu mode and attempt to restore it oh and we've got a signal on the Mac Mini that's good and it had already aired here by this point with the other so somehow mixing those nands seems to have actually worked holy cow it's taken a while yeah that's good that means it's definitely a good summer at this point Mac Mini just shut off here and it seems to be rebooting so we'll see what he does still a white light on the front that's a good sign we got a video signal we got a signal come on and there it is oh my god oh man it's gone is this the monitor or the Mac Mini there we go yay oh my gosh it freaking worked oh my God two terabytes I am so relieved me too dude when I left the last time I was legitimately worried that we were just gonna brick a Mac Mini and waste 200 yeah at the very worst yeah you could put the original dance back but true the fact that it just works it just works oh I'm so happy I know the I think the important thing is that we learned some important lessons on how to do this upgrade going forward yeah definitely so gotta be careful with demands step one step two use blank nands when you do this upgrade brand new blank Nance that's another key and then three ah I think that's actually it so yeah yeah I mean at the very least we can now confirm like obviously the only way that we're ever going to know about this is through experimentation so we were basing everything off of what we had been able to find online so now we can provide the most current up-to-date information which is get blank nands use the current version of configurator and Mac OS Ventura and seemingly that's the recipe for Success here for upgrading an M1 Mac Mini yeah and then cable wise I'm using a USBC to USB 3 a style cable there's your current up-to-date information if you want to take on an upgrade such as this if you have the the tools and equipment it's actually very cost effective I mean a hundred bucks if you want Apple to do that upgrade it's 800 this has been a roller coaster of a video I know but we finally made it and I'm absolutely over the moon yeah I am too this was a lot of work a lot of waiting for shipments from China yeah so a lot of suspense and definitely definitely a bit of stress you guys I cannot overstate how excited I am that this upgrade worked I was really nervous after we wasted that initial 180 on the first set of nand and we were like oh God did Apple change something did did they make this method of using Apple configurator to basically reprogram the nands not work anymore and fortunately we can at least confirm that as of right now in summer of 2023 under Mac OS Ventura yes you can upgrade the storage in apple silicon devices and I've also seen people do this with the RAM chips so theoretically if you have a hot air station all of what we just showed you for replacing nand would also work on the unified memory which means you could go up to 16 gigs and this is all fantastic news sort of because if you want to upgrade your Apple silicon device 2 times the ram eight times the storage it is physically possible and that's great except that the skill set required to do so is way higher than in the old days where all you needed was a Phillips head screwdriver now you're going to need to potentially Source multiple sets of nand chips given that some of them just might not work you're also going to need a hot air station you're going to need a chip re balling station most likely you're gonna need flux and solder Wick and that little Pokey tool that I forget the name of it it's a lot more involved than it really needs to be especially given how much gosh dang empty space is in this Mac Mini why can't everything just be on removable storage it's clearly possible the Mac Pro has user upgradable storage that Apple sells on their website so it's clearly physically possible they just don't want you to do it because they charge eight hundred dollars for two terabytes but we did it for a hundred bucks anyway I'm very happy but I'm also very annoyed because it shouldn't be this difficult but it is possible so I'm very happy as you can see I'm very conflicted on this whole situation but the moral of the story is if you want to upgrade your Mac Mini or theoretically your MacBook Air your MacBook Pro what have you Bob's your uncle it's possible maybe next we should try an M2 let me know in the comments if you want to see that let me know your thoughts on this project down in the comments below as usual thank you guys so much for watching it really means a ton go check out Colin's video he goes super super in-depth and again a huge thanks to him for literally making this possible because he's a little wizard man and he's a genius with that I will see you guys in the next one [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Luke Miani

Views: 557,382

Keywords: apple, repair, m1, ssd upgrade, apple silicon, Mac mini, 2tb ssd, Mac mini upgrade, M2, Mac upgrade, Apple, Tech, Right to repair, Apple upgrade

Id: apEKAY11NQs

Length: 20min 29sec (1229 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 11 2023

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[u/DanTheMan827]

TLDW: it works, but you have to use blank NAND.

Cost is about $100, so very economical if you have the equipment to solder them.

It does however mean a board that is dead due to NAND can be repaired

Here’s dosdude1’s video on it.

https://youtu.be/X7C_hdJsY4Y

[u/THE_BURNER_ACCOUNT_]

Absolutely insane that Apple charges 800% markup for that SSD

[u/oloshh]

I love Colin but I think his nand research was kinda not complete. But the overall takeaways within the Chinese nand bga rework scene is that specific devices only work with specific nands with properly written underlying nand data, hence the device specific pairing, especially when taking into the consideration the 2018-2019 A1 nands from 4 different vendors, also the A1 and K1 series tied to the M1 family and also the current 315 Kioxia drives.

There are vendors out there who sell blanks, there are vendors who sell reprogramed chips and there are vendors who can program whatever the nand provided, provided that it actually makes sense to program it for a device specific application, or to better put, only if at any point the nands in question were within a factory provided combination for the said device.

This branch of rework is extremely important because at some point flash memory will die and a lot of devices can be saved from becoming e-waste.

[u/A-Delonix-Regia]

Kewl.

Just for reference, off-the-shelf 2TB SSDs actually cost $80 (for the Samsung 970 Evo Plus at 3.3-3.5GB/s read-write speeds) to $120 (for the Samsung 980 Pro at 5-7GB/s read-write speeds) right now (I'm not listing MSRP, I am listing the actual price you will have to pay for those).

[u/smakusdod]

Dosdude1 needs to sue The Good Doctor for stealing his likeness.

[u/lazazael]

got 16ram but id love to upgrade my 256 capacity also

[u/FriedChicken]

This would have been much better as a blog post

[u/Immediate_Depth_6443]

It would make Apple's loyal customers really happy if they just charged 2x PC part prices for SSD & RAM upgrades.

We'd complain far far less.