6 ms·

This is a set of NAND chips on a PCB, nothing special. They directly attach to the NAND controller on the SoC, which means as long as you stay within the capabi

This is a set of NAND chips on a PCB, nothing special. They directly attach to the NAND controller on the SoC, which means as long as you stay within the capabilities of the controller, you could use other chips. Third party boards have already been designed and made, and they work. The main issue is that people don't really know much about NAND, so they assume it's like an SSD (it's not) or eMMC (it's not) where you plug it in and some hardware magic turns it into a disk (it doesn't). What happens here is that the secure enclave, cryptographic accelerator and flash controllers are all packaged together. This gives you sick speeds and performance while also making it more secure than your average OPAL TCG trash that often isn't even implemented at all. To make the embedded flash controller work with the NAND, you need two things: - NAND chips that actually work with the controller. Not all chips do, especially low-end crappy bulk NAND chips won't do. People keep track of the NAND chips that apple uses and you can buy those and it will be fine - The data in the NAND needs to make sense (so either have it empty or populate it ahead of time) - Using USB-C you tell the embedded controller to revive and it will setup the NAND for you, this is available to anyone (so not locked behind some secret sauce). In a way, this is similar to having a classic SSD, replacing the NAND chips on that SSD, and then telling the SSD controller that it has new NAND chips. Or to having a really old MFM/RLL hard drive before IDE and SCSI existed. The storage device really is just dumb storage and the smarts are all in the controller. While we have moved this around back and forth a few times over the years, there is no conclusive benefit to one or the other. Having more smarts on the device means there is also more problems/variability on the now 'smarter' device. This is especially problematic during data recovery, or when you want your data storage to be trustworthy. A lot of the hardware work has been done by dosdude1, and a table of NAND chips like this one: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apple-silicon-soldered-ssd-upgrade-thread.2417822/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apple-silicon-soldered-... can show you some options. The reason Apple does this is the same reason as ever: if they feel like this is the best way to make some sort of experience work, they will do it. And if they make fat stacks of cash in the process, they aren't going to be sad about it. This is something that isn't exclusive to Apple, but most manufacturers don't have to luxury to design their own hardware, they have to integrate with a lot of partners, use reference designs or maybe even outsource their hardware to some white label manufacturer. This is also why you see more glue, foam pads, smaller components etc all over the industry: it gets the manufactured devices to do the thing they want it to do. If PCs became modular in the process, that was a side-effect, not much of a goal. (The goal was to upsell crap later down the line so your market is bigger) As for pricing, that is just whatever the market will bear and not all that much related to the cost of raw material. This is of course not new and is default practice in most commercial businesses. So cheap components does not equal cheap products. (but cheap components might equal low quality products in some cases)

jsheard 2y ago
> What happens here is that the secure enclave, cryptographic accelerator and flash controllers are all packaged together. This gives you sick speeds and performance while also making it more secure than your average OPAL TCG trash that often isn't even implemented at all. Apples SSD performance is nothing special, and if they wisely don't want to trust OPAL TCG they can encrypt the data in their own trusted silicon before handing it over to the untrusted SSD controller. That's pretty much what the Playstation 5 does, it supports standard NVMe drives but the disk encryption is done in custom Sony silicon so the third party SSD controller never sees the plaintext. I'm not convinced there's any purpose for the way Apple does their storage aside from vendor lock-in.
- oneplane 2y ago
  I don't think you can get a mass market SSD that does what this thing does. Not unless you change some parameters. The speeds and bandwidth you get is always with full encryption for all blocks. That might not be special to you, but doing this mass market in a way that doesn't make exploits and bypasses appear faster than the manufacturers can patch it (looking at TCG, BitLocker etc) is definitely special to me. As for that other methods may work (making the chain longer by introducing a separate bus, two transceivers, an additional controller from another vendor, extra firmware, extra power buses), they have done that in the past. In practically every shape: - SCSI - ATA/IDE - SATA - NVMe over custom physical port before M.2 was broadly available with the same specs, but probably also cheaper for them They also have had drives in all sizes as well, both internal and external. That includes most forms of modularity (external: entire drive + enclosure, just the drive or just the enclosure, internal: 5.25, 3.5, 2.5, CF-sized) and controller wise they also have done all variants: add-in card, on-board, on-chip, third party controller, first party controller, combinations where they did only the firmware or only the hardware, ones where the fabric and the controller were combined etc. So technology wise, it's not like they haven't gone back and forth with many, many combinations. Business-wise: > I'm not convinced there's any purpose for the way Apple does their storage aside from vendor lock-in. First of all, I highly doubt Apple gives a shit. Their model of lock-in is making a better combined experience than the competition. If they could do that with some random western digital black SSD while making the same amount of money, they would do it. But more importantly: if Apple would do that, they would still charge you $1000 for that SSD, even if it's only 1TB. The concept of lock-in is making it so that people don't want to pay the cost of leaving. You can't lock people in with just the stick (an SSD-shaped stick with a $1000 price tag) if you don't have a carrot. Secondly: I don't want or need to convince you, but trying to shoehorn a business in such a one-dimensional take is not exactly a good way to spend your energy.

jsheard 2y ago

> What happens here is that the secure enclave, cryptographic accelerator and flash controllers are all packaged together. This gives you sick speeds and performance while also making it more secure than your average OPAL TCG trash that often isn't even implemented at all. Apples SSD performance is nothing special, and if they wisely don't want to trust OPAL TCG they can encrypt the data in their own trusted silicon before handing it over to the untrusted SSD controller. That's pretty much what the Playstation 5 does, it supports standard NVMe drives but the disk encryption is done in custom Sony silicon so the third party SSD controller never sees the plaintext. I'm not convinced there's any purpose for the way Apple does their storage aside from vendor lock-in.

oneplane 2y ago
I don't think you can get a mass market SSD that does what this thing does. Not unless you change some parameters. The speeds and bandwidth you get is always with full encryption for all blocks. That might not be special to you, but doing this mass market in a way that doesn't make exploits and bypasses appear faster than the manufacturers can patch it (looking at TCG, BitLocker etc) is definitely special to me. As for that other methods may work (making the chain longer by introducing a separate bus, two transceivers, an additional controller from another vendor, extra firmware, extra power buses), they have done that in the past. In practically every shape: - SCSI - ATA/IDE - SATA - NVMe over custom physical port before M.2 was broadly available with the same specs, but probably also cheaper for them They also have had drives in all sizes as well, both internal and external. That includes most forms of modularity (external: entire drive + enclosure, just the drive or just the enclosure, internal: 5.25, 3.5, 2.5, CF-sized) and controller wise they also have done all variants: add-in card, on-board, on-chip, third party controller, first party controller, combinations where they did only the firmware or only the hardware, ones where the fabric and the controller were combined etc. So technology wise, it's not like they haven't gone back and forth with many, many combinations. Business-wise: > I'm not convinced there's any purpose for the way Apple does their storage aside from vendor lock-in. First of all, I highly doubt Apple gives a shit. Their model of lock-in is making a better combined experience than the competition. If they could do that with some random western digital black SSD while making the same amount of money, they would do it. But more importantly: if Apple would do that, they would still charge you $1000 for that SSD, even if it's only 1TB. The concept of lock-in is making it so that people don't want to pay the cost of leaving. You can't lock people in with just the stick (an SSD-shaped stick with a $1000 price tag) if you don't have a carrot. Secondly: I don't want or need to convince you, but trying to shoehorn a business in such a one-dimensional take is not exactly a good way to spend your energy.