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> SSD upgrades at a 500% markup. Is the price difference really that high or are you comparing them to cheaper SSDs?

by sureIy 2y ago

jsheard 2y ago
It's absolutely that high. Upgrading a Mac Mini from 256GB to 2TB is an extra $800, and a high-end 2TB NVMe drive like the WD SN850x is around $150 at retail. Even the 8TB version of that drive is only $650. That's why external SSDs are so common in Mac setups, even accounting for the additional cost of a Thunderbolt enclosure it's usually still significantly cheaper than getting a bigger internal SSD from Apple.
- Retric 2y ago
  Using a gaming part is a poor comparison because gaming parts get higher speeds at lower prices by sacrificing longevity/energy efficiency. Clearly not the tradeoff Apple wants to make here. Which isn’t anything against the SN850x, it’s a great fit for the intended use case it’s just many people assume there’s zero trade-offs involved beyond speed/price/capacity. Apple is definitely raising storage prices to milk their customers and promote their iCloud cash cow, but it’s still worth considering when looking at ‘gaming’ parts in different situations.
  - rudedogg 2y ago
    A Samsung 990 Pro dips to the same prices. I got a 2TB one for $150 this Black Friday. Apple is overcharging for storage. You get a lot of compute for cheap though :/
    - Retric 2y ago
      A perfectly reasonable comparison and I agree with your point.
  - kayson 2y ago
    Is it clear? Apple doesn't publish endurance specs for their drives so there's actually no way to tell. 600x full drive writes (what the 2TB SN850X is specced for) is probably enough for the vast majority of users to never have to worry about it. You can even get enterprise SSDs, which are rated in whole drive writes per day for less than that.
  - wtallis 2y ago
    It's a fair comparison. Both Apple's computers and drives like the WD SN850x are using commodity SSD-grade TLC flash; there's no significant difference in quality, performance, efficiency, or durability in the flash itself. It's possible (maybe even likely) that a Mac with 2TB of built-in storage is using literally the same NAND flash dies that show up in a SN850x. SSD performance and power efficiency are significantly affected by the choice of controller. Apple's Macs have the controller built-in to the SoC, so it's a sunk cost that doesn't really factor in to upgrade pricing.
    - Retric 2y ago
      I said poor not unfair. They might happen to end up with equal price per flash chip, but either could end up being more expensive it’s just not a good yardstick IMO. Anyway, what you might consider insignificant differences are things companies do consider these worth paying for. You not caring isn’t the same thing as nobody caring. > significantly affected by the choice of controller Aka it is more complicated than just slapping different controller on the same chips and calling it a day.
  - twoparachute45 2y ago
    The SN850x isn't a "gaming part", it's a top-of-the-line consumer SSD that uses the exact same type of NAND chips (3D TLC) that Apple uses in its products.
    - LukeShu 2y ago
      Western Digital themselves are literally calling the WD_BLACK line their gaming line[1], and their page for the SN850X in particular is dripping with "gaming"[2]. Maybe that doesn't make it a bad comparison, but the SN850X is def intended to be a gaming part. [1]: https://www.westerndigital.com/brand/wd-black https://www.westerndigital.com/brand/wd-black [2]: https://www.westerndigital.com/en-in/products/internal-drives/wd-black-sn850x-nvme-ssd https://www.westerndigital.com/en-in/products/internal-drive...
      - vlovich123 2y ago
        What is a competing part that you think would be more comparable? Gamers are the ones buying expensive parts so it makes sense to market to that. The next tier after this is basically server-class 10-20k machines which Apple is definitely not competing with (and SSDs are not really that much better in that class anyway). Dismissing SSDs as “gaming” parts as if it’s diminishing the quality misunderstands what’s happening here. It would be one thing if WD was ignoring fsyncs to achieve this performance but gamers don’t care about writes so much anyway and there’s no indication WD did that. Source: I have the WD and Samsung parts as well as cheapo random SSDs.
        twoparachute45 2y ago
        The other product lines would be WD Blues (marketed at "creative professionals working with large files") and WD Reds (marketed specifically for use in NAS's), but neither of these really support the argument that the SN850x isn't a good comparison, because both the Blue and Red lines are cheaper and less performant (and the Blues are even rated for less longevity), and just make it seem like Apple is price gouging even more. The point I was trying to make by pointing out that the SN850x isn't a "gaming part" is that the SN850x is literally the top-of-the-line, most expensive consumer SSD sold by WD, and has practically the same specs as other top-of-the-line, most expensive competing parts like the Samsung 990 Pro. Being one of the most expensive SSDs on the market means that saying that the SN850x is a bad comparison because it's supposedly "lower price" is just false on its face.
  - wqaatwt 2y ago
    Is something like the Crucial T705 or Samsung 990 or also “gaming” parts? Their manufacturers provide 5 years warranties unlike Apple. AFAIK Apple doesn’t even disclose endurance ratings. Wouldn’t you expect the opposite?
    - nickjj 2y ago
      > Their manufacturers provide 5 years warranties Yep and it's possible to get much more out of it. I've been running a Crucial MX100 256 GB SSD for 10 years. It's at 63% health from a S.M.A.R.T. readout. It's been powered on 125 times over ~10 years and transferred 56 TB in that time. It's my main Windows partition and runs WSL 2 where I've built and ran thousands of Docker images. Basically, it hasn't been sitting here unused.
      - Retric 2y ago
        0.5% is a meaningful difference in defect rates, but simply isn’t meaningful on an individual scale.
    - Retric 2y ago
      Samsung 990 is marketed as a PRO part and a reasonable comparison, hell it’s likely a better product than what Apple is shipping. But when a company slaps gaming 30 times on the product page, lists specific features to minimize load times etc it’s clearly targeting a specific demographic who in general wants different tradeoffs. At scale failures are more than just endurance ratings. Gaming laptops for example often cook their components due to prioritizing performance over long term stability. That doesn’t guarantee early failure, but it reduces the likelihood the system is working in 4 years.
- fweimer 2y ago
  Surely the WD SN850x isn't high end? It doesn't even have power-loss protection as far as I can see. SSDs with protection are much more expensive. (Not sure if Apple SSDs have power-loss protection. Not using sockets probably eliminates one source of accidental power loss.)
  - yread 2y ago
    There are also a lot cheaper ssds (nv2 or p3 are under 100 eur for 2tb often)
  - wtallis 2y ago
    The SN850x is high-end for client/consumer SSDs. The ones you're referring to that have full power loss protection are enterprise SSDs, which is an entirely different market segment with different performance targets, different endurance rating methodology, and different expected feature set. Enterprise SSDs are not the right thing to compare Mac storage against.
    - dustyventure 2y ago
      Still, it's confusing to use WD as an example of high end. They have dramless which is like the winmodem of SSDs, and even in this case no encryption. Clearly they are a budget manufacturer that happened to have something that worked out for some people. Samsung is a much better example of a manufacturer that Apple would be emulating, investing in their own controllers, etc, and certainly not leaving out security features with no plan.
      - wtallis 2y ago
        You're completely wrong. Both Samsung and WD have a full lineup of consumer and enterprise SSDs, retail and OEM, including low-end DRAMless budget drives and high-end drives, with vertical integration of the NAND manufacturing, controller silicon, and bringing the complete drive to retail. Writing off WD as a budget manufacturer in favor of Samsung is stupid brand loyalty ungrounded in reality. Dismissing a high-end product because the same company also sells different low-end products under a different sub-brand is also ridiculous.
edgineer 2y ago
M4 Pro 512GB --> 2TB cost: $600 M4 Pro read/write: ~5.4/6.7 GB/s Samsung 990 Pro 2TB: $170 990 Pro R/W: ~7.1/6.2 GB/s Samsung 990 Evo 2TB: $130 990 Evo R/W: ~4.8/3.9 GB/s Sorry no links, looked at tomshardware, Amazon, and macrumors forums for numbers.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- jillesvangurp 2y ago
  Samsung has an 8TB and 4TB model as well. The 8TB is 509 euros in Germany (inc VAT). The 4 TB one is 233 euro. I have an older 2TB one. USB 3.2. Plenty of speed for putting lots of media, large software packages (e.g. Xplane 12 with a lot of scenery) etc.
jchw 2y ago
AFAIK the NAND they use on Mac products is not really particularly special, they seem to shift between a lot of different chips (often Kioxia/Toshiba) and many of them seem at best to be middle of the road. A lot of industrious folks were just buying the chips directly and performing SSD upgrades the very hard way, since it was simply worth the savings if you could.
wqaatwt 2y ago
Apple is selling 256 GB for $200 So it’s probably even considerable more than 500%. Unless you believe that Apple only buys “magic” components like the 8GB=16GB crowd there is nothing particularly special about their storage or memory. Their SSDs even aren’t that fast. You can get faster ones for $200 (EXCEPT they are 2TB instead of 256GB)

> SSD upgrades at a 500% markup. Is the price difference really that high or are you comparing them to cheaper SSDs?

by sureIy 2y ago

> SSD upgrades at a 500% markup. Is the price difference really that high or are you comparing them to cheaper SSDs?

It's absolutely that high. Upgrading a Mac Mini from 256GB to 2TB is an extra $800, and a high-end 2TB NVMe drive like the WD SN850x is around $150 at retail. Even the 8TB version of that drive is only $650. That's why external SSDs are so common in Mac setups, even accounting for the additional cost of a Thunderbolt enclosure it's usually still significantly cheaper than getting a bigger internal SSD from Apple.

Retric 2y ago
Using a gaming part is a poor comparison because gaming parts get higher speeds at lower prices by sacrificing longevity/energy efficiency. Clearly not the tradeoff Apple wants to make here. Which isn’t anything against the SN850x, it’s a great fit for the intended use case it’s just many people assume there’s zero trade-offs involved beyond speed/price/capacity. Apple is definitely raising storage prices to milk their customers and promote their iCloud cash cow, but it’s still worth considering when looking at ‘gaming’ parts in different situations.
- rudedogg 2y ago
  A Samsung 990 Pro dips to the same prices. I got a 2TB one for $150 this Black Friday. Apple is overcharging for storage. You get a lot of compute for cheap though :/
  - Retric 2y ago
    A perfectly reasonable comparison and I agree with your point.
- kayson 2y ago
  Is it clear? Apple doesn't publish endurance specs for their drives so there's actually no way to tell. 600x full drive writes (what the 2TB SN850X is specced for) is probably enough for the vast majority of users to never have to worry about it. You can even get enterprise SSDs, which are rated in whole drive writes per day for less than that.
- wtallis 2y ago
  It's a fair comparison. Both Apple's computers and drives like the WD SN850x are using commodity SSD-grade TLC flash; there's no significant difference in quality, performance, efficiency, or durability in the flash itself. It's possible (maybe even likely) that a Mac with 2TB of built-in storage is using literally the same NAND flash dies that show up in a SN850x. SSD performance and power efficiency are significantly affected by the choice of controller. Apple's Macs have the controller built-in to the SoC, so it's a sunk cost that doesn't really factor in to upgrade pricing.
  - Retric 2y ago
    I said poor not unfair. They might happen to end up with equal price per flash chip, but either could end up being more expensive it’s just not a good yardstick IMO. Anyway, what you might consider insignificant differences are things companies do consider these worth paying for. You not caring isn’t the same thing as nobody caring. > significantly affected by the choice of controller Aka it is more complicated than just slapping different controller on the same chips and calling it a day.
- twoparachute45 2y ago
  The SN850x isn't a "gaming part", it's a top-of-the-line consumer SSD that uses the exact same type of NAND chips (3D TLC) that Apple uses in its products.
  - LukeShu 2y ago
    Western Digital themselves are literally calling the WD_BLACK line their gaming line[1], and their page for the SN850X in particular is dripping with "gaming"[2]. Maybe that doesn't make it a bad comparison, but the SN850X is def intended to be a gaming part. [1]: https://www.westerndigital.com/brand/wd-black https://www.westerndigital.com/brand/wd-black [2]: https://www.westerndigital.com/en-in/products/internal-drives/wd-black-sn850x-nvme-ssd https://www.westerndigital.com/en-in/products/internal-drive...
    - vlovich123 2y ago
      What is a competing part that you think would be more comparable? Gamers are the ones buying expensive parts so it makes sense to market to that. The next tier after this is basically server-class 10-20k machines which Apple is definitely not competing with (and SSDs are not really that much better in that class anyway). Dismissing SSDs as “gaming” parts as if it’s diminishing the quality misunderstands what’s happening here. It would be one thing if WD was ignoring fsyncs to achieve this performance but gamers don’t care about writes so much anyway and there’s no indication WD did that. Source: I have the WD and Samsung parts as well as cheapo random SSDs.
      - twoparachute45 2y ago
        The other product lines would be WD Blues (marketed at "creative professionals working with large files") and WD Reds (marketed specifically for use in NAS's), but neither of these really support the argument that the SN850x isn't a good comparison, because both the Blue and Red lines are cheaper and less performant (and the Blues are even rated for less longevity), and just make it seem like Apple is price gouging even more. The point I was trying to make by pointing out that the SN850x isn't a "gaming part" is that the SN850x is literally the top-of-the-line, most expensive consumer SSD sold by WD, and has practically the same specs as other top-of-the-line, most expensive competing parts like the Samsung 990 Pro. Being one of the most expensive SSDs on the market means that saying that the SN850x is a bad comparison because it's supposedly "lower price" is just false on its face.
- wqaatwt 2y ago
  Is something like the Crucial T705 or Samsung 990 or also “gaming” parts? Their manufacturers provide 5 years warranties unlike Apple. AFAIK Apple doesn’t even disclose endurance ratings. Wouldn’t you expect the opposite?
  - nickjj 2y ago
    > Their manufacturers provide 5 years warranties Yep and it's possible to get much more out of it. I've been running a Crucial MX100 256 GB SSD for 10 years. It's at 63% health from a S.M.A.R.T. readout. It's been powered on 125 times over ~10 years and transferred 56 TB in that time. It's my main Windows partition and runs WSL 2 where I've built and ran thousands of Docker images. Basically, it hasn't been sitting here unused.
    - Retric 2y ago
      0.5% is a meaningful difference in defect rates, but simply isn’t meaningful on an individual scale.
  - Retric 2y ago
    Samsung 990 is marketed as a PRO part and a reasonable comparison, hell it’s likely a better product than what Apple is shipping. But when a company slaps gaming 30 times on the product page, lists specific features to minimize load times etc it’s clearly targeting a specific demographic who in general wants different tradeoffs. At scale failures are more than just endurance ratings. Gaming laptops for example often cook their components due to prioritizing performance over long term stability. That doesn’t guarantee early failure, but it reduces the likelihood the system is working in 4 years.
fweimer 2y ago
Surely the WD SN850x isn't high end? It doesn't even have power-loss protection as far as I can see. SSDs with protection are much more expensive. (Not sure if Apple SSDs have power-loss protection. Not using sockets probably eliminates one source of accidental power loss.)
- yread 2y ago
  There are also a lot cheaper ssds (nv2 or p3 are under 100 eur for 2tb often)
- wtallis 2y ago
  The SN850x is high-end for client/consumer SSDs. The ones you're referring to that have full power loss protection are enterprise SSDs, which is an entirely different market segment with different performance targets, different endurance rating methodology, and different expected feature set. Enterprise SSDs are not the right thing to compare Mac storage against.
  - dustyventure 2y ago
    Still, it's confusing to use WD as an example of high end. They have dramless which is like the winmodem of SSDs, and even in this case no encryption. Clearly they are a budget manufacturer that happened to have something that worked out for some people. Samsung is a much better example of a manufacturer that Apple would be emulating, investing in their own controllers, etc, and certainly not leaving out security features with no plan.
    - wtallis 2y ago
      You're completely wrong. Both Samsung and WD have a full lineup of consumer and enterprise SSDs, retail and OEM, including low-end DRAMless budget drives and high-end drives, with vertical integration of the NAND manufacturing, controller silicon, and bringing the complete drive to retail. Writing off WD as a budget manufacturer in favor of Samsung is stupid brand loyalty ungrounded in reality. Dismissing a high-end product because the same company also sells different low-end products under a different sub-brand is also ridiculous.

edgineer 2y ago

M4 Pro 512GB --> 2TB cost: $600 M4 Pro read/write: ~5.4/6.7 GB/s Samsung 990 Pro 2TB: $170 990 Pro R/W: ~7.1/6.2 GB/s Samsung 990 Evo 2TB: $130 990 Evo R/W: ~4.8/3.9 GB/s Sorry no links, looked at tomshardware, Amazon, and macrumors forums for numbers.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jillesvangurp 2y ago
Samsung has an 8TB and 4TB model as well. The 8TB is 509 euros in Germany (inc VAT). The 4 TB one is 233 euro. I have an older 2TB one. USB 3.2. Plenty of speed for putting lots of media, large software packages (e.g. Xplane 12 with a lot of scenery) etc.

jchw 2y ago

AFAIK the NAND they use on Mac products is not really particularly special, they seem to shift between a lot of different chips (often Kioxia/Toshiba) and many of them seem at best to be middle of the road. A lot of industrious folks were just buying the chips directly and performing SSD upgrades the very hard way, since it was simply worth the savings if you could.

wqaatwt 2y ago

Apple is selling 256 GB for $200 So it’s probably even considerable more than 500%. Unless you believe that Apple only buys “magic” components like the 8GB=16GB crowd there is nothing particularly special about their storage or memory. Their SSDs even aren’t that fast. You can get faster ones for $200 (EXCEPT they are 2TB instead of 256GB)