M1 Mac Mini Soldered SSD Upgrade
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- Опубликовано: 28 сен 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...
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 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🎉🎉
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.
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!
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
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
Collin's voice is so calming, even though i know he is stressed doing this operation.
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
Why does this guy only have 90k subscribers? A guy like you should be exposed more and have millions. More power to you!
I can totally feel the joy and satisfaction from you guys.
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
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.
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.
such a resilient tryout. so excited to see the success finally. very impressive! soul of fun of retrofitting!
Well earned result, congratulations for your calm focus and determination!
You are a gift to this world Colin, I discovered you through Luke's channel. Good job.
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?
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.
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 :-)
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?
Amazing work!
The nerve racking trial and error approach.
Great troubleshooting done!
Glad it's all working.
Awesome videos, both sides. Can you post a link for the NANDs you’ve bought?
your voice is so calm and soothing !!! great work my dude, you just save bros hundreds of dollars per upgrade !!!
Amazing feat! Really enjoyed the genuine excitement when it worked and the level headed reaction on the attempts leading up to success
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
About the nand placement issues. You should get a nand programmer. It seems to be impossible to work without it
Perhaps do a full disk write-read test to ensure that the full 2tb is working without error?
u have some determination! after all that you again bought a new set of blank nands! cheers and good luck!
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”.
Show me something impressive Collin... And SBAM! Here it is... and I got the mac mini M1... same as this one... gosh!
I love your perseverance! You kept a positive attitude the whole time and just kept at it! Great job!!
That's quite a ride. Swapping in and out. Glad it worked at the end. 2TB.. thats so nice.
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🎉
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!
Great video, any chance that you could provide the information of where to get the proper chips?
Very cool to see this colab, also it's crazy to see that storage upgrade, congratulations!
Where do you buy the blank nands?
Do you ever plan on experimenting with upgrading the soldered RAM on the M series chips?
Great job Collin
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.
“My Mac Mini is abouddaget juiced” says Luke 😂
Hi! Great video! Can you please share the link to where to buy the blank SSD NAND chips?
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.
Crunchy chips and hot solder my favorite bytes. Well done, not an easy task 👏 👍
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.
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 RUclips 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
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? 🤯😬
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
Apple: now with ARM M1 and M2 processors with soldered ram, no one can made their own changes
Dosdude: I am INEVITABLE 💀
Love this! Someday I can upgrade my M1 iMac. Thank you for your hard work.
Hands of a surgeon, man. Great respect and great job!
Congratulations on sticking with this and getting the upgrade to work. One question, how do you clean the board after attaching the NANDs? As you know, that flux has got to be removed otherwise you're going to have serious corrosion problems. In a production facility, the boards go through a wash process. What do you do?
I normally ultrasonic clean the boards after I finish working, but sometimes I will just thoroughly clean with rubbing alcohol.
Mac and Apple people are soo good :) they so happy to upgrade their own PC storage :D
Where did you get the blank chips? I heard it's impossible to buy them new and blank.
DosDude has such an awesome voice.
I feel you guys missed an opportunity to say "it's alive!!!!1".
Do ram next! 😁
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.
it was like watching a movie. nice happy ending. i love happy endings.
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.
Let's go bro that's awesome.
You could upcycle super charged M series. Better than raspberry is apple pi.
Is memory all that one may solder?
Colin to Colin - good stuff !!!
Congratulations on this upgrade 🎉
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.
5:05 I think I was even more nervous than you here =D GJ!
The harmonics in your voice 👌
Wow, that's actually amazing! But sheer amount of randomness in this process makes it risky as hell.
Siiiiiiiiiiick!! Nerded out w y’all the entire time 😂
I skipped to the end but you get my like. Good job. 🎉
Never seen sorering sore balls this way! Nice one.
good content again Collin
.And sticking it apple with there 400%nand tax.
WELL DONE
Wow, so much dedication...I would've never thought that two different chips would solve the problem...at the end of the day, I will avoid Macs from now on, because the trouble of loosing an unrepairable 1000+ bucks machine is not worth it..FU hard, Apple.
Great Video!
On Lukes Version we were told, that the trick was:
using USB-C to USB3 connection and that the NANDs have to be empty (not pre-programmed)
Here conclusion is: USB-C to USB-C connection and it seem that the NAND order was impotant - or one of the NANDs was faulty?
I used the USB-C to USB-C cable originally, I forgot to show the last attempt with the USB-C to USB3 cable (though I don't think it really made any difference). One of my unprogrammed NANDs ended up being faulty, but luckily combining it with one of the initial (supposedly programmed) NANDs I got actually ended up working. But if the NANDs are actually programmed, then the order of the chips DOES matter. Unprogrammed NANDs can be installed in either position.
@@dosdude1 thank you very much for this fast and precise answer!
Thanks for sharing! That was very useful for me!
300°F I’m guessing? You didn’t specify Fahrenheit or Celsius. Super interesting video!
Thanks COllin, God bless you
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
Thanks. Makes me appreciate my pc even more!
luke is like the guy in corner chair just watching
Someone had a bit too much caffeine before starting this upgrade. Or was just nervous. Highly recommend you get an Atten 862D hot air station. Makes this so much easier and it’s really affordable.
Just nervous LOL, first time really doing an upgrade that involved underfill removal. I actually really like the hot air station I have currently, an Aoyue 852A++. It works well, and I've never had an issue with it.
@@dosdude1 lol. Okay, reason I recommend the atten is because it eliminates the vibration of the air pump. Uses a turbine fan instead of the typical air pump that vibrates the whole workspace when you turn it on.
That’s very cool. Do you think a layer or two of Kapton tape would help on keeping the components around the chips in place?
Also, at the end, why do you think this specific combination of chips worked? One used and one new?
what if those storage chips had serialized firmware tied to that specific machine.
Now you need to put the other 2 nands into an apple computer to see if they work or not, or put them on a ssd blank for a 2TiB ssd.
Why is the NAND soldered on the board in the first place?
By the way one of the weird up things they've done is of the you do what you're doing and you don't plug in a monitor during a restore it might not go through
I heart was in my mouth! Excellent video video as always. I have the same M1 Mac Mini model... Hmmm... Maybe later, though. I'm still busy having fun running Asahi Linux on my M1. So many things to learn! Aloha!
Where can I buy those ssd's chips? What about Ram? Can I upgrade it and what's the maximum? Thx
Usually these are sold labeled if there are more than one chip. If they seller didn’t label it, they are just conning. I’ve got three pairs so far and they were all labeled as 0 and 1, indicating which goes where.
You need a NAND flasher / cloner like the P14 pro. Backup the original chips and put the image onto the new chips.
oh man.. ok. I would love this done for my new Mini m2.
Might need to reach out for this.
Thanks for your efforts to uploading this video for the hacking communities~
i would love to see this on a Apple MacBook Pro M2 with RAM upgrade..
well done saw luke 's video! u rock!
Butt puckering stuff. I was nervous for both you and Luke.
Where did he actually get the storage from, I can’t find any for purchase
Just watched Luke's vid.
Hi, thanks for your great video. Could you please tell me which magnification or microscope you are using? I tried to solder small SMDs once but I had serious problems seeing what I was doing. EDIT: After seeing Luke's video the components don't seem that small. Last time I tried TSSOP and it seems smaller. However, I am still interested in your magnification equipment.
Damn bro, so were you able to figure out if the other two chips were bad?