Upgradingstorage spacecan get expensive quickly when you’re looking to buy a newMacfromApple. A company based in France is looking to change that for the M1/M2Mac Studio, and soon theM4 Mac mini.
Polysoft Services, a repair center in France, reverse-engineered the Mac Studio’s removable storage module and is now planning to sell its own storage modules compatible with the device next year after a successfulKickstarter crowdfunding campaign.
Apple launched the M1 Mac Studio in 2022 and the M2 Mac Studio in 2023. Unlike the MacBook Pro or iMac, the Mac Studio doesn’t have soldered storage and has an easily accessible removable storage drive. However, people were unsuccessful when they tried swapping it out with SSDs from other companies. That’s where Polysoft comes in.
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Polysoft took matters into its own hands
The Studio Drive is faster and cheaper than Apple’s storage
To get a replacement SSD to work on the Mac Studio, Polysoft completely reverse-engineered the Mac Studio’s SSD and developed its own from scratch that is faster, thanks to an improvedSLC cache. “So, we sacrificed a SSD module, removed all its small components one by one using a laser station, inventoried them and measured their characteristics, then we oil sanded every layer with fine-grained sandpaper and scanned every layer with a flatbed scanner,” Polysoft said on itsKickstarter pagedescribing the process.
Polysoft customized and designed the boards differently from Apple so it could add overvoltage protection to protect the storage module’s NAND flash memory from data loss in the event of voltage regulator failure. In August 2024, the company received its first prototypes of its in-house designed Mac Studio SSD, dubbed the “Studio Drive,” and began sending them out to tech community members to test to great success. Its Kickstarter campaign for the Studio Drive received full backing too.
Polysoft plans to sell theStudio Drivefor less than what Apple charges for storage. The 2TB Studio Drive for the Mac Studio M2 costs €399 (about $421) on itsKickstarter page. Upgrading the Mac Studio M2 to 2TB of storage onApple’s sitecosts $600.Polysoft saysyou’ll be able to buy the Studio Drive from its website in a few weeks. The company isn’t stopping with the Mac Studio either, and is already working on designing boards for the M4 Mac mini.
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