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Transcend Announces 1TB JetDrive Lite 330 Expansion Card for 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro

Spotlighter9 said:
As someone who purchased a BTO 16" M1 MBP with 2TB of storage, I don't understand why someone would purchase a 1TB Transcend Card for $250 over purchasing the additional internal 1GB for $400 from Apple (or additional $80 for 512GB).
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Because $250 is less than $400? Plus, you can add it after purchase.

Why would you pay $400 just for enough space to carry around your media library, demo videos, archive images/documents etc. The 1TB version may well be a bit over the top, but the $60 256GB option can free up 256GB of your expensive, super-fast Apple SSD for stuff that actually needs the performance.

Spotlighter9 said:
blazing speed, swappable memory, wear leveling, etc
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...are of no value whatsoever when all you want to do is open a single document or play back a finished movie/song from your (rarely updated) media collection/portfolio/archive.

Also - those people comparing with Samsung T7s etc. - please remember that in a fair benchmark you start the stopwatch with the flush-fitting JetDrive already plugged into your MacBook and the T4 & its USB cable in your rucksack. If that isn't your use case then this product isn't for you.

Of course, you're paying a premium for a Mac-only product rather than something for the generic PC market - whether that is justified by economies of scale or just Transcend assuming that Mac users have deeper pockets, who knows?
 
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Rather than buy an oddly-shaped sd card for too much$ you can get these (fitting the old macbook, at least) as sd adapters on Aliexpress
 
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ahurst said:
I think the general consensus from the Ashai Linux project reverse-engineering these Macs is that it's a byproduct of the M1 being a scaled-up iPhone/iPad chip more than anything else. Basically, the A-series chips have the all the SSD controller logic and fimware that's usually on an NVMe SSD itself built directly into the SOC, so it only talks with raw flash storage modules. Since you can't buy raw flash storage modules, Apple's just soldered them for now (or made custom swappable modules in the case of the Mac Studio).

Internally the M1's SSD communication protocol apparently deviates from NVMe a fair bit too, and also communicates directly with the CPU using RTKit instead of over PCIe.
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Not just the M1 - Intel Macs with a T2 security chip (which is a glorified A10 in and of itself) had the T2 acting as the hardware controller for the built-in raw flash storage in a similar setup. All T2-equipped Intel Macs had soldered storage save for the Mac Pro, which has an upgradeable proprietary card but which has to jump through hoops in Configurator to change out the primary SSD. This was done for security purposes; the fact that it forces users to pay extraordinary upgrade fees to increase storage is a happy coincidence for Apple.
 
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This goes into the SD slot? Is the SD slot even capable of that kind of speed?
 
Eric_WVGG said:
I really want one of these for an onboard Time Machine backup, but if the speeds are as bad as they say then I'll just wait for an inevitable competing product to roll around.
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How much does speed matter for this use case, though? Your incremental backups happen in the background so who cares if they're a little slow, and how often are you going to restore from it that faster read speeds would make a big impact?
 
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I'd quite like one of these for my Mac Studio. I under-specced the internal storage because I didn't understand the difference in performance between internal SSDs and external ones.(Only got a 1TB drive instead of a 2TB one, and couldn't amend my order once it was under way, without going to the back of the queue and not seeing my new computer until mid-June). A Thunderbolt connected NVME external SSD would be faster, sure, but a quasi-built in 1TB would probably serve my day-to-day needs OK. I agree the price of this seems high though.
 
nwcs said:
I understand why it’s there but that doesn’t mean Apple should have gone that way. As digital cameras fade into the distance more and more of the ones that remain are using CFE
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Well, just done a quick straw poll of Canon and Nikon DSLRs and SD is still looking like the most common format on cameras for sale today... plus you're ignoring all the other (non-DSLR) uses of SD that I mentioned.

In 2016, Apple made the big mistake of assuming that everybody was going to be using USB-C for everything... 5 years later they're backpedalling, re-introducing HDMI, MagSafe and SD on their laptops and still releasing new desktops with USB-A. They didn't make that U-turn because of a few people sounding off on MacRumours. Going with CFExpress over the ubiquitous SD, even in 2022, would be repeating that mistake.

Also, nobody really knows how many spare PCIe lanes Apple have on the M1 Pro - that could be a limitation, both of CFExpress and the faster SD variants they could have used.
 
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I used to use this with my 2013 MBA. It was a decent solution for augmenting my 256gb of storage. Used it mostly for storing all the files for my thesis which got to be a lot.

These days though, since I can afford it, I just ponied up for the 1TB upgrade.
 
Spotlighter9 said:
As someone who purchased a BTO 16" M1 MBP with 2TB of storage, I don't understand why someone would purchase a 1TB Transcend Card for $250 over purchasing the additional internal 1GB for $400 from Apple (or additional $80 for 512GB). The advantages of internal storage (blazing speed, swappable memory, wear leveling, etc) seems well worth the $150 cost difference. It just doesn't make much sense unless you couldn't wait for BTO or realized you needed more storage well after you purchased. Not sure I would rely on the transcend card for time machine backups. With that all said, I applaud Transcend for providing options.
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Other than it's still expensive, I think there's plenty of use cases out there where you don't need the benefits of the internal drive and it just doesn't seem worth it. For example, media files or emulators. That's why I bought the 512gb 330 drive for my 14" MBP which is 1TB. Sure I still have space on my internal SSD but I'd rather use that for things which really benefit from the faster speeds.
 
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Eric_WVGG said:
I really want one of these for an onboard Time Machine backup, but if the speeds are as bad as they say then I'll just wait for an inevitable competing product to roll around.
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I wouldn't rely on a SD card for time machine backup - the speed probably isn't important, but it's not the most reliable medium. Also, because Time Machine keeps a "history" of files and will grow large over time, you want a Time Machine drive that's about twice the size of the drive it is backing up.

You certainly don't want it as your main backup strategy - it might be OK as a secondary backup/"extended undo" combined with other, regular backups to guard against drive failure.

I think that good old spinning rust is still the best bet for backups...
 
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Further validation that the SD Card slot on the MacBook Pro is a reincarnation of the floppy drive.

This just makes me more angry that Apple brought back the SD card slot on the MacBook Pro.

In fact, the presence of the SD card slot makes me so angry, I simply refuse to use it. I use a dongle in the Thunderbolt port when I want to transfer from my SD card.

I’d much rather have 1 mm overall less thickness on my 16” MBP than the SD Card slot and HDMI port.
 
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BootsWalking said:
You only have to use the software included on the drive if you want the optional hardware-based encryption, so that it can prompt for the key when you plug in it. I have not heard about anything resembling a root kit for these so I don't know what you're referring to.
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Can you use Mac OS's native hard drive encryption on the external drive?
 
theluggage said:
I wouldn't rely on a SD card for time machine backup - the speed probably isn't important, but it's not the most reliable medium. Also, because Time Machine keeps a "history" of files and will grow large over time, you want a Time Machine drive that's about twice the size of the drive it is backing up.

You certainly don't want it as your main backup strategy - it might be OK as a secondary backup/"extended undo" combined with other, regular backups to guard against drive failure.

I think that good old spinning rust is still the best bet for backups...
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Yup, I know.

Example use case: I was traveling for the entire month of last February. I like to travel light and anyway wanted my Time Machine back home (along with a complete disk clone, I don't rely on TM there either), so figured it would be okay to do without for 28 days.

And I predictably wound up with one of those "extended undo" events, had to rebuild about a days worth of work. (Yes, the Mac does keep some partial Time Machine backups locally, but for whatever reason nothing was retained.)

This is mostly about peace-of-mind and weird possibilities like that and also the fact that I'm just annoyed that I had to give up a Thunderbolt port for a pointless HDMI port and a card slot I would never, ever otherwise use. The notion of sealing that thing makes me smile. But the notion of it running at the same speed as the same solution of ten-years-ago makes me sad.
 
Yeah, I would have liked the extra USB-A port over the SD slot; I do use the SD slot on rare occasions, but I have a reader for those times. Also agree, I went with 1 TB on my 16" MBP, should have gotten 2 TB.
 
m3digi said:
Further validation that the SD Card slot on the MacBook Pro is a reincarnation of the floppy drive.

This just makes me more angry that Apple brought back the SD card slot on the MacBook Pro.

In fact, the presence of the SD card slot makes me so angry, I simply refuse to use it. I use a dongle in the Thunderbolt port when I want to transfer from my SD card.

I’d much rather have 1 mm overall less thickness on my 16” MBP than the SD Card slot.
Click to expand...
The SD card slot isn’t adding to the thickness of the laptop. The HDMI port is.
 
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theluggage said:
Well, just done a quick straw poll of Canon and Nikon DSLRs and SD is still looking like the most common format on cameras for sale today... plus you're ignoring all the other (non-DSLR) uses of SD that I mentioned.

In 2016, Apple made the big mistake of assuming that everybody was going to be using USB-C for everything... 5 years later they're backpedalling, re-introducing HDMI, MagSafe and SD on their laptops and still releasing new desktops with USB-A. They didn't make that U-turn because of a few people sounding off on MacRumours. Going with CFExpress over the ubiquitous SD, even in 2022, would be repeating that mistake.

Also, nobody really knows how many spare PCIe lanes Apple have on the M1 Pro - that could be a limitation, both of CFExpress and the faster SD variants they could have used.
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SD cards are only used in the very low end consumer DSLRs that are on their way out as people are buying smartphones instead and have been for a decade. The most common format after CF Express is XQD followed by CF. CF is used in the Canon 5-series until the R5 which switched to CF express. SD is often also provided on some lower end bodies as a backup card slot instead of dual CF Express. But that slows down the cameras write speed and if I did have a camera with SD I would still want to transfer from the CF Express card at 1700 MB/s instead of then under 250 MB/s of the fastest SD card via the built in reader. Though both my cameras are dual CF Express and all my future cameras will be CF Express or CF Express 2.0 so the SD slot will never be used by me nor most professional photographers and videographers.
 
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