in this video I'm going to be upgrading this M1 Max Apple Mac Studio from its original 512 GB of storage to its absolute maximum of 8 tabt now for those of you who have looked into this process in the past you would know that unlike all other Apple silicon Macs that have soldered storage I guess excluding the M2 Mac Pro the Mac Studio has its storage on removable modules now with that in mind you might think that unlike the ones with soldered storage in this instance you can just simply replace the storage modules with larger ones with ones of larger capacity and simply upgrade the system that way well if you've taken a look at previous attempts of other people doing this and documenting their experiences online you would know that in most cases uh those attempts have not been successful and the reason for that is because despite this machine not having soldered storage you still have to treat this storage as if it were soldered storage if that makes any sense so if we go ahead and take a look at one of the storage modules from the Mac Studio here you can see that it is a pretty small module here obviously proprietary but you can see it's simply a board with four NS on it now if you've ever seen any normal SSD you would know that an SSD has a controller and nans on it and the reason that this storage module only has nans on it is because like every other Apple silicon system the storage controller is part of the m1c itself so that's why you can't simply just swap these around and expect them to work now if you've seen any other previous videos of mine you would know that I have experimented with doing soldered storage upgrades and many other Apple silicon m and upgrading the storage in the Mac Studio is essentially the exact same process as upgrading the storage in those systems with soldered storage and you must treat it as such so with that in mind what we need to do is somehow get eight blank one tbte Nan chips into this machine and the reason I say blank and if you watch my previous videos I go into this in a bit more detail uh but essentially you must use brand new blank nans that don't have any specific programming on them um in order to upgrade one of these systems and the reason for that is when blank nans are installed onto the system uh the restore process will program them appropriately for the configuration that they're installed in in the system so the next hurdle we have to get over here is the actual board itself so if we go ahead and flip the Mac Studio over here and and take a look inside it you will see that down here in this area we have got two slots so you can see right here we've got one slot with a storage module installed and on the other side we've got another slot with no storage module installed now as I mentioned we have to get eight 1 TB n into the system to achieve an 8 TB configuration well well how exactly are we going to do that well we need a second nand module which obviously I have right here but as you can see this is a factory Apple nand module which not only are extremely hard to find but when you can find them of course they already have NS on them which we're not going to even be using in this instance but they're also extremely expensive and that is where a good friend of mine Guiles of polysoft Sur in France has come in so as you can see here we've got a fresh brand new storage module PCB here completely custom designed by him and as you can see I've actually got two of them and you can see that compared to the original module here they look almost identical but uh you will notice a few small differences there here and there um both in some you know circuit design of the board uh but if you take a really close look here you can see that he's replaced this little data Matrix here with his logo so I found that kind of funny there um so in this video I'm going to use these two modules to upgrade this Mac Studio now having brand new modules like this is a huge benefit because not only can I use them to upgrade machines that say people send to me but I can simply solder NS onto these send them to someone else and they could simply install them do a dfu restore on the system and have a upgraded system of course once with blank n on here you can put these in any configuration at least one that's supported by the actual system um and then just upgrade it yourself with these new modules so before I begin the upgrading process here uh the first thing I want to do is I want to boot the system up as it is right now and do a dis speed test with the single module installed and then we can compare that result with the upgraded system after we install both of these modules with of course 8 terab of total storage and see if the speed changes at all um I don't really expect there to be that much of a difference uh but I do expect to be at least maybe somewhat of a difference so let me go ahead and get this machine hooked up to a keyboard monitor Mouse we'll boot it up and take a look at the speed of the current installed storage all right so as you can see here I've gotten the machine all booted up and connected here so let's go ahead and check out about this Mac and you can see there that like I mentioned this is an M1 Max model Max studio uh with 64 GB of system memory installed um my friend who sent this to me did install the uh Sequoia beta on here so it is running that uh but if we go ahead and go into more info here um you can see that the storage is currently of course 512 gigabytes so of course that's what we are going to be upgrading in this video but as mentioned the first thing I want to do is do a quick disc speed test here so let's go ahead and get out of this open up the tool here that I tend that I intend to use and we'll go ahead and just run the test now so you can see that we're getting about uh 600 or yeah 6,000 megabytes per second read right speed and a little under 5,000 megabits per second or sorry megabytes per second read speed so that's our Baseline numbers here like I mentioned I don't think that's going to change all that much uh but it might so I definitely want to get that uh so we can do a a comparison after the upgrade and see what it does so with that I'm going to go ahead and get it shut down um and then we'll just start working on those new Nan modules of course we don't really need to do anything uh with the Mac Studio itself at this point uh but we do need to of course prepare some new nans to be installed onto those modules so with that I'll go ahead and begin the process of beginning to reball some 1 TB Nan chips all right so as you can see here I've gotten my new set of Nan chips out here ready to begin reballing them and uh these of course are brand new blank chips as I mentioned and and are of course 1 TB in size and in particular in this instance I am using part number kicm 223 nans as you may be able to uh make out right there and of course like I mentioned we have four nans for each module and the total after installing all eight will of course be 8 terabytes now cost-wise these nans cost about $500 for me to get and when you compare that to the $2,400 that Apple charges uh to upgrade from 512 GB to 8 TBT uh when you buy one of these Mac Studios new uh that is a huge amount of cost savings uh at least in Parts alone here and even with the labor involved to do this upgrade it's still going to end up being less than half of what you pay uh to have Apple upgrade this for you or buy one new with this amount of storage already installed um and one last thing I want to mention here if you take a look at the Nan module that I've received from gues here you can see that on each set of Nan pads here there is one pad that has been covered with some solder mask you can see the same is true on the other side of it as well and this of course is not the final design of this particular board and he did make one mistake where he accidentally tied this pad which is supposed to be a no connect pad to Round And while in most cases that usually doesn't cause any problems I guess there is a function of the nand uh that is affected when you tie this to ground um so that has to be uh blocked off and not connected uh for it to work properly now in addition to this solder mask applied on the pad itself I am also going to remove uh the solder from that particular pad of each one after reballing them uh that way we can be certain that no issues will rise so with that uh we're just going to begin the reballing process here and of course the first step is to take each chip and align it to the footprint on the stencil here so the way I'm going to do that is just use some capton tape and simply place the nand on it like so and then we can align it to the holes in the stencil and just like that the nand has been aligned to the holes in the stencil and we can now begin the reballing process so in order to do that um I'm just going to use uh this tool with some solder paste on it as you can see there and then we're going to Simply take that and press it into all the holes on the stencil and I usually go over it a few times just to make sure there's an even amount of solder paste in each hole and just like that we're ready to start heating so in order to heat I'm going to turn my hot air on to about 300° C and now with that up to temperature I'm going to take this pair of angle tweezers and press down to ensure that the stencil stays fully seated against the chip and then we will start [Music] heating and with all this solder paste now melted onto the respective pads heads let's go ahead and remove the chip from the stencil and then I'm just going to apply a little bit of extra flux and heat it one more [Music] time and now of course the last thing I want to do is remove that one pad or at least remove the solder from that one pad uh that is a no connect pad on the board here so in order to do that we just need to make sure we get the correct one here and it looks like pin one is going to be right there so it'll be kind of inverse here so it'll be that pad right there that we need to remove so in order to do that I'm going to kind of cut my solder P or my solder Wick here at a little angle and then and we will take that get the chip up to [Music] temperature and just use the solder Wick to remove it just like so so with that all done now we just need to repeat that process seven more times for each of the other chips and then we will be ready to begin soldering them onto the new modules [Music] [Music] all right as you can see here I've successfully reball all eight chips um you can see that I've removed solder off that one pad on each one and uh you might also notice that I've removed the flux from each chip as well and the reason I've done that is because uh with these uh large pitch chips like this with the uh solder pads you know spaced out pretty far from each other uh when you reball these with solder paste uh it tends to leave leave uh little pieces of solder balls kind of floating or little pieces of solder floating in the uh flux on the Chip And you want to remove that because when you solder that on the board uh there's a chance that those tiny little pieces of solder could cause shorts between some of the pins which obviously you don't want so with that all done the next thing we need to do is simply solder each of these chips onto both of these modules so of course four chips on one module and four chips on the second module so with that we'll begin the process of soldering those chips onto the nand modules all right so in order to perform this soldering you can see I've got uh one of the modules in this little board holder here uh which helps hold it in position and keeps it from moving around on me while I'm soldering um so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to get the board uh get a little bit of heat in the board so preheat the board a little bit uh with my hot air uh then we'll apply some flux and then we can simply solder our newly rebelled chips onto it [Music] all right so I've got a nice amount of heat in it now so now we should be able to just apply flux and it'll kind of just spread out as a liquid like that and with that all done we can simply take two of the chips doesn't matter which ones cuz they're all blank unprogrammed and simply place them into position so get them pretty well aligned like so and now we'll simply take the hot air and solder them onto the [Music] board all right and now those two are soldered on successfully so now we just need to let it cool down just a little bit flip the board over and solder the two on the other side [Music] and just like that one module is done so now I'm just going to repeat that same process with the second module here and at that point uh everything will be ready to [Music] go all right so I you can see here all eight NS have been soldered on successfully and everything looks really really good on these cards um as you can see there is still a little bit of flux on there but I will clean that off uh once I test these and make sure everything works as expected um but soldering wise uh all the chips look to be soldered on pretty well uh the only thing that was a little bit concerning you might be able to make it out with this one is the piece of enamel or the piece of a solder mask that was applied to that one pad uh was a little bit tall and it's kind of pushing the chip up a little bit on this Edge uh but the solder balls are pretty pretty big so I don't think that will be uh any issue in this instance so now all that's left to do is get these modules installed in the Mac Studio perform a dfu restore and see if everything works as expected so with that let's get them installed all right so as you can see I've got the max Studio relatively disassembled here so now we just simply need to remove the original module just like so and then we can take one of our new modules doesn't matter which one at this point and install it into the slot there's one installed and somewhat annoyingly the second one is missing its screw so I guess we're just going to have to put it in there with no screw at this point but these are very secure slots and it won't make a difference really at all and there we go fit right in so that's ready to go so now let me get the power supply and the little frame put back in and we'll be ready to give it a test all right so I've got everything connected here I've got another uh Mac connected to it an M1 MacBook Air via USBC so now all we need to do is boot the device into dfu mode and in order to do that you simply hold down the power button while plugging the device in and as you can see there the device is now in dfu mode with the little LED on the front flashing amber and you can see that the M1 MacBook Air over there has detected the device so now we simply need to restore software onto it so to do that we're just going to hold option and select restore Mac um I'm going to go ahead and select this Mac OS Sonoma version 14.5 ipsw here and we'll select open all right and the restore process has begun here and we've got a video signal on the display there which is a really good sign and yes the restore is progressing with the custom 8 tbte modules installed so now we simply have to sit here and wait and in theory everything should go according to plan and just like that the restore has completed successfully and it chimed and there it is look at that so let me go ahead and get Mac OS set up here and then we'll take a final look at the specs and run the speed test all right so as you can see I've gotten Mac OS set up here so let's take a look at about this magc so you can see of course it is the same system the same uh M1 Max Mac Studio with 64 gigs of RAM installed so now let's go ahead into more info here and if we scroll down look at that 8 terabytes of internal storage so let's check out system report NVM Express and there it is right there Apple SSD AP 8192 r with a total capacity of 8 tabt so that is now a fully maxed out at least storage wise um M1 Max Max studio uh we can take a look at disc utility as well which should show us the same thing and yeah there we go 8 tabt of onboard or I guess into internal storage so let's go ahead and get out of all this and we'll run the speed test now like I mentioned I don't really expect there to be too much of a difference here but definitely should try it at least okay so it is it is a little bit faster especially in the right speed but the read speed is more or less the same maybe slightly faster uh but overall not a massive difference in speed which is about what I expected so with that that has been the successful upgrade of this M1 Max Apple Max studio from its original 512 GB of internal storage to its maximum of 8 terab of storage and like I mentioned the total cost of this for the chips at least was about $500 which is a very very good deal compared to the $2,400 that Apple normally charges for this upgrade so I want to give a huge thanks to gues of polysoft services once again for Designing these awesome boards um without them this upgrade would have been a lot more difficult we would have had to remove all eight of those underfilled chips off of those Factory boards and it would have just taken a whole lot longer and not to mention be even more expensive with those hard to find boards so very very thankful that gues took on the challenge of reverse engineering and designing a completely custom Nan PCB module for the Mac Studio so with that I hope you enjoyed this video