The Drive Outside the Machine
A 512GB compromise accepted at purchase, and the second purchase it took to live with it.
May 2025. Two months after the machine, I bought a drive.
The Compromise
The machine came with 512GB and I knew the number when I paid for it. It was the compromise that made the rest of the configuration possible. I wanted the 16-inch, and on the 16-inch 1TB meant stepping up to an M4 Max, which was past what I could spend. The 14-inch did come with 1TB, but it topped out below the memory I was after, so it was never in the running. I took the small drive and bought the machine anyway.
Two months later the fix arrived, and it was not inside the machine at all.
The Repair
Before the hardware: nothing had run out. Two purchases two months apart read like an emergency, and this one wasn’t. The 512GB was a number I could see coming, not a hole I had already fallen into. I bought the drive while there was still room inside the machine.
The fix came in two pieces. One was a 1TB Samsung 990 EVO Plus, a bare module about eighty millimetres long and nine grams. The other was the enclosure I bought along with it, because a module on its own has nowhere to sit.
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Affiliate link: if you buy through it I get a small referral cut, at no extra cost to you.
Nothing goes inside the machine. The storage in these machines is soldered to the logic board: no slot, no bay, nothing a screwdriver reaches. What you order is what you keep for as long as the machine runs, and the second purchase is what it cost to route around that.
The enclosure runs over USB-C at ten gigabits, which measures around 900 megabytes a second on a real file transfer, a little under a fifth of what the storage inside the machine manages. A Thunderbolt enclosure would have closed most of that gap, and I bought this one instead. The drive’s job is to hold a terabyte that had nowhere to live inside the machine. It doesn’t need to be quick, and for what I use it for, it’s enough.
Where everything ends up is a hierarchy I arrived at more than designed. The small models stay inside the machine, since those are the ones I want to open without thinking about it, and load time is the one place the slow cable shows up. The bigger ones load from the drive, and so do the knowledge graph database I keep beside them and the VM image. Everything else follows the same rule: the small things stay inside, and the bulky ones don’t. Sixteen months on, the internal still has room to spare.
The Same Drive Now
I did not know storage prices were about to move.
A 1TB drive was the modest choice, the one nobody would call an extravagance, and as far as I can tell it went up as hard as anything larger. The same drive now costs roughly two to three times what I remember paying. Sometime in between, the shortages started, and the complaint turned into a genre: screenshots of last year’s price next to this year’s, captioned with some version of “I should have bought it earlier.”
The compromise turned out to have been bought at the last reasonable moment, and not because I read anything correctly. I was early by accident; I’ll take that, and I won’t pretend it was judgement.
What I’d claim instead is narrower. The repair was cheap because the problem was legible. One drive, one number, one purchase that closes the hole. A soldered disk is a wall, and walls announce themselves, so you can price a way around one.
The drive was for room. Model files and VM images are the bulky things and always were, and I wanted that weight off a disk I can’t add to. I was solving for size, and size doesn’t move.
Illegible constraints are harder to shop for. There’s no part for a machine that’s a little slow, or a setup that’s a little annoying, and nothing to read off an order page. Mine was the buyable kind. It announced itself in the first month, in a number I already knew.