this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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I'm actually super in favor of these weird parts made with salvaged components in China.
You can also find laptop CPUs transformed into desktop platforms with a motherboard included.
The sellers are also surprisingly open about it - they explain the limitations and hacky patches to make them work.
..but if they're scavenged from old Apple products, who knows how much wear the flash has? It might have a drastically shortened lifetime; that would be very bad for an SSD.
interface ICs, etc. don't wear in this way, but Flash memory.. I'd never want used flash for my SSD.
Meh, good enough for a games drive, Google Drive cache and seedbox.
Beats having Apple products in a landfill because they're firmware locked and nobody bothered with the password.
Fair enough, so long as one knows what one is getting. If it's for mostly read-only storage I guess it could be fine, as your use cases suggest.
It's far more likely that these chips are new production that didn't meet the original buyer's (probably Apple) quality requirements so they were binned and resold to other buyers.
Obviously that has to be reflected in the price of the product. Presumably even more so with storage.
Also there might be a use case, where cost is paramount and the drive would experience very limited writes.
I've got a personal anecdote that's not entirely the same, but I've bought a bunch of flash chips from china to use with retro games. Those are often salvaged, but they are also cheap and available to buy. It doesn't matter if the chips can't take too many write cycles, if you only flash them a couple of times.
Good use case for old flash, and I'm all for saving bits from the landfill if they can be used. Hmm. That reminds me I should get my retro game setup going again...