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.
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...