a trend with laptops that needs to die is this whole "lets just put the NVMe directly on the motherboard" thing. apple started it, but now other vendors have followed. i shouldn't have to do impromptu board repair to save my data.
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Just FYI, but at least with Apple’s implementation, the onboard SSD is cryptographically linked with the security coprocessor. Even if you could remove the SSD, there is nothing useful that can be done (unless you count erasing the drive as useful)
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Apple's SSD controller is *in* the SoC. What you can pull off of the board is basically raw flash memory with a custom interface, so not exactly easy to do data recovery on, even ignoring the crypto.
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yes, on apple (especially M1) the flash memory is entirely useless if you take it off the board.
i don’t know to what extent that is true on my dell, but either way, that still sucks that it’s all on one board there too
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At least there are security reasons for the crypto stuff, and security and performance reasons to put the controller in the SoC... Other vendors just solder down generic NVMe for no damn reason.
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UFS/NVMe controller in the SoC is how most mobile devices work.
Snapdragon has similar inline encryption/decryption support, but it's optional to use in the wrapped key mode where the OS can't access the keys. Even when it's not in wrapped key mode, keys are usually hw bound.
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in this case we’re talking about a core i5 laptop from 2017 tho
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It's a nice way to make sure people have to pay them premium prices on mediocre SSDs.
I'd totally believe Apple did it primarily to stop people using a low end SSD or RAM (assume that's why iPhone didn't move to USB-C) and/or because they want tear down pictures to look pretty.
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in this case, it's a dell laptop, but same thing. ironically, the RAM is still replaceable, just not the SSD :D
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I'm pretty sure my XPS 13 is the opposite and has soldered RAM but not the SSD. I think at least some of the new variants have both soldered.
I haven't actually booted it for a couple years since I prefer a proper keyboard/monitor + desktop so much over using that tiny thing...
mine has some soldered RAM and an upgrade slot. i looked at the schematic again, it's very strange