Why? Soldered drives are awful. If your motherboard dies you can kiss goodbye to your data. Watching Louis Rossmann’s repair videos disillusioned me from ever wanting to upgrade internal storage beyond 1TB.
Externals are cheap, fast, and safe. It’s win/win/win, the only downside is that they’re inconvenient if you want to use the laptop on a non-flat surface (such as a lap), but I’m not sure I would pay the Apple tax just for that.
> Soldered drives are awful. If your motherboard dies you can kiss goodbye to your data.
You have backups though, so who cares? Your motherboard died, you need a new computer anyway. Do a restore. And it’s not like external drives can’t fail; they’re just tiny computers.
> It’s win/win/win, the only downside is that they’re inconvenient if you want to use the laptop on a non-flat surface (such as a lap)
Hard disagree, friend. Example: my editing software has a ‘cache’ folder. If I set it on the external drive and that drive isn’t mounted for whatever reason, the software defaults back to ~/Movies. The first you know of this is the system notifying you that you have 20MB of hard drive space left.
There’s no substitute for an always-there-no-matter-what internal drive.
You can, but as someone who is currently juggling external SSDs to try to get a video project finished, I can tell you that you don’t want to.
Hence me yesterday looking at the 4TB upgrade price on the M3 MBP. Hoooooooly cow. I mean I’ll almost certainly get it on my next upgrade, but wow.
Why? Soldered drives are awful. If your motherboard dies you can kiss goodbye to your data. Watching Louis Rossmann’s repair videos disillusioned me from ever wanting to upgrade internal storage beyond 1TB.
Externals are cheap, fast, and safe. It’s win/win/win, the only downside is that they’re inconvenient if you want to use the laptop on a non-flat surface (such as a lap), but I’m not sure I would pay the Apple tax just for that.
> Soldered drives are awful. If your motherboard dies you can kiss goodbye to your data.
You have backups though, so who cares? Your motherboard died, you need a new computer anyway. Do a restore. And it’s not like external drives can’t fail; they’re just tiny computers.
> It’s win/win/win, the only downside is that they’re inconvenient if you want to use the laptop on a non-flat surface (such as a lap)
Hard disagree, friend. Example: my editing software has a ‘cache’ folder. If I set it on the external drive and that drive isn’t mounted for whatever reason, the software defaults back to ~/Movies. The first you know of this is the system notifying you that you have 20MB of hard drive space left.
There’s no substitute for an always-there-no-matter-what internal drive.
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Via USB/Thunderbolt or SD card you can. But you can't upgrade or replace your SSD in an Apple Silicon MacBook.
You can't add nvme that get the nvme level of performance.
Especially not at the level we'd be used to in any other serious isecase (eg. Split PCIe lanes into x4 and have a bunch of fast storage)