Well, recent jumps in ram prices also cause the ssd market to go higher, since ssds are literally made with non volatile ram (NAND flash). This affects everyone that sells ssds, including even myself, and i only sell through my customers/friends circle and what i posted here. My own ssd supplier, soon as recent prices went skyhigh, immediately informed me that he's raising his prices. It's a chain reaction and affects everyone.
Still, with all the recent price hikes in ram related products if you ask me right now, "wtf do you have for sale" or "is there a bargain i can have?" i will tell you that i can sell you
Micron 5100 PRO 3.84 tb SATA III (lightly used with 100% life) for 180 euros and
Intel DC P4610X 7.68tb U.2 NVME pci-e gen 3 sealed, brand new for 350 euros and i will throw in the adapter needed for m.2 or pci-e slot for free.
Now, these are not current gen ssds but they are truly reliable workhorses and they are by far, much cheaper than their equivalents you find in Ebay/Reddit/ServerPartDeals or elsewhere. Plus i 'm not a ghost seller, you can reach me via phone, email and Whatsapp etc. anytime, if something happens, i 'm always avail.
With all that said, only a few peeps here bought drives from me (and i thank them of course). Which goes to show there is reluctance from people to buy something that will give them much better performance than their mechanical hdds even when it's cheap.
Or perhaps it's just me they don't like, which i can live with, np haha.
You 'd think that when selling quality products for cheap, people would rush to buy them. Errr nope. It's fine by me, i didn't have high expectations anyway and i already have been selling a lot of these ssds only by word of mouth.
So in a nutshell it really isn't a price matter, at least from where i stand. Some people just won't leave their comfort zone and some others find it hard to make the leap towards newer technologies. And some people straight out wouldn't trust giving a stranger money for tech products, which is also understandable.
Cheers

 

Another question (sorry!): Do NVME ssds like the ones inside Macbook last longer than "normal" ssds and do they also need to be powered up regularly to prevent data loss?

 

I was looking for an external HDD of 8 TB to back up my two external Samsung 4TB Portable SSD T7 Shield USB 3.2 Gen 2 Black drives (which cost €700). Which 8 TB HDD would you recommend?

 

Last edited: Nov 22, 2025 at 2:33 PM

Nope they won't last longer and they are pretty normal ssds and not something really fancy like DataCenter/server ssds with extended life. There is nothing exotic about the ssds Apple uses. Half the times it is a Samsung ssd and the other half is usually divided among Toshiba/Kioxia (same parent company like ie. Micron/Crucial) and SK Hynix. What differentiates Apple comps from Windows comps in terms of storage is, about 8-9 years ago, Apple came up with the Apple File System (AFS) which is strictly meant to be used with ssds and has a few advantages against the aging NTFS Microsoft uses. There is plenty of bibliography in this, so i will not get into details, i have done so in the past. Plus they charge a shitload of money for a typical oem ssd, earning something from 500% up to even a 1000% over the original ssd's wholesale price. And same goes for the ram which is embedded in their own Apple Silicon cpus which of course as a technology has a great deal of perks, but at the end of the day, a top of the line M4 with 128gb ram and 8tb ssd costs about 7.500 euros and side by side with a similarly spec'd pc with a 9950X3D cpu, Apple's M4 eats shit from AMD's Ryzen brute force when we 're talking large DAW projects, with the Ryzen cpu running from 50% to even 100% more VSTis than any Apple Silicon cpu. Especially with sample based VSTis like Kontakt, Falcon, Omnisphere, East West Opus and VSL to name a few. And beware, with me, you 're not talking with a fanboi. You are talking with a professional who has done the particular test and a ton of other comparison tests as well, and i do know my way around Macs and MacOS. What i crave is "horsepower" and i don't give a flying fk who is it that will give it to me or my clients for that matter.
So, what may lead some peeps to believe that Apple Silicon is faster than anything, is what we call cpu burst speed and this is something that M4 is probably best at, with the lowest possible latency. But this is only good for small to medium projects where as since the Ryzen 9 7950X's release and onwards, AMD leads the way in large DAW projects. And you can have all this horse power for a fraction of the money, a 9950X3D pc with 128gb ram and 8tb ssd will not set you back more than 2000-2500 euros depending on what subsystems you choose.
This just to keep you informed. Apple does innovate but frankly their tech is not truly competitive at the price they are selling it. They just wrap their products with great presentation and super sleek design and continuously evolve a super expensive ecosystem making billions every year, selling consumer tech at the price of Quantum computing, pun intended. And i haven't even talked about Threadripper which truly bridges the gap between desktop and server with desktop speeds and server-like connectivity, 2 to 3 times more than desktop platforms, a true engineering marvel, real workstation platform that scales up to 96 Ryzen based cores lol. (And yes we don't need this, but people who make soundtracks for a living, have gone the leap towards Threadripper years ago)
General Info: When you see an ssd carrying a DC tag in its name, it is a server ssd (dc stands for datacenter) and has extended life and some other real world advantages over consumer ssds. But since these drives are meant to be used constantly, that is 24/7, they have little tolerance in data retention when powered off, much less than consumer ssds. So they are not meant to be powered sporadically. Still, in a pro/semi-pro desktop environment they are superior to consumer ssds in many ways. And don't just take my word for iall of the above, ask AI and see if what i say stands true or not.

There is a misconception that i will try to clear and @r4e hit it correctly although partially. WD are NOT the better drives. There is a significant difference in failure rate when ie. i have 10 Seagate drives deployed and one fails and another has 3 WD drives and none fails.
It only means that because Seagate is much more spread in numbers it also has a bigger failure rate, and half the times this number is due to admins' wrong deployment procedures. If you dive in the crazy world of datacenters and serverland, you won't believe the amount of ignorance and half knowledge spread and shared among various companies' IT employees that are supposedly "professionals" with a degree.
Personally talking about hdds, i have tried 'em all extensively and more or less they are about the same, only Seagate is cheaper and in some cases comes with much better warranty options. With that said, there are exceptions in the "they 're all the same thing" rule: Innovative newer hdd technologies, for instance Seagate's MACH2, has dual actuators in one drive leading to double sequential speed and those drives can hit 350-400mb/sec, so not the same as the rest of normal hdds. And practically speaking dual actuators may very well be explained as twice the chance of failure hehehe.
If we 're talking about 8tb hdds i would choose a Toshiba X300 since in this capacity it offers the best ratio of performance vs price and i would pair it with a quality USB enclosure, end of story. I tend to keep away from WD and Seagate external drives as they are good enough for storage but not shock resistant no matter what they claim. If you drop it while it's powered on, kiss it bye bye or pay for data recovery, gl with that. So since there is no truly reliable external hdd, i would choose the most cost effective solution that will also give me the best performance in class i can get and this is what i just proposed.
Something that annoys me a lot the last years,
WD has and still to some extent uses shady practices. Many times hides important info from end users leading them to believe they are getting the better drive when in fact they don't. There have been class action lawsuits against them for this, you can look it up for yourself, i'm not very much into creating drama for the sake of it, not how i roll mate, i like hard cold facts, but facts need to be explained correctly and things are not always what they seemingly are. I do have 5 Seagate Exos in raid 5 deployed in a NAS 3 years now, no fail whatsoever so far, but this doesn't prove anything really, so to speak. I also have a WD Raptor that still works 15 yrs later but several WD green have died, some evn within warranty. Again, personal testimonies mean nothing, the general picture and stats (for instance Backblaze paints a very nice picture) explain that all mechanical drives are more or less prone to fail for the very same reasons.
Cheers

 

Last edited: Nov 22, 2025 at 6:19 PM

Thank you @taskforce for the explanations and especially the tip about the Toshiba X300 hard drive.
Yes, now I see light at the end of the tunnel.

Seagate Backup Plus Desktop 3TB - externe 3,5"

I once had three external 3GB Seagate hard drives, all of which broke after being connected two or three times. I joined an American class-action lawsuit and sent the lawyer my invoices and data, but unfortunately, I haven't heard anything to this day. With the three external hard drives, after a tip from another user, I removed the casing and was able to use them internally in my PC again.

Court issues order, upholds claims

Judge Spero of the Northern District of California ruled on February 9, 2017, on Seagate's motion for dismissal. He refused to dismiss the plaintiffs' consumer protection claims based on Seagate's statements regarding the annualized failure rates of the drives, suitability for use in certain RAID configurations, and (2) unjust enrichment claims. The plaintiffs will continue to pursue these claims vigorously. Read the order » Did you purchase Seagate's Barracuda 3TB hard drive, Backup Plus 3TB external hard drive, or any other Seagate hard drive with model number ST3000DM001? You may be entitled to a refund under consumer law.

Fill out the form to learn about your rights »

 

Last edited: Nov 22, 2025 at 6:24 PM

That is a nice wall of text to build to answer what should be a simple question. You have a bit of anti-apple going rant going, comparing threadripper performance without noting the costs being exponential. I also like the requisite shot at people with college degrees of some kind, because anything that may require a long enough attention span to finish something longer-term like that usually means people don't know what they are doing. Not bad.

Maybe I will feed it into an AI and see what it has to say about the technical because I don't need the typing practice. But it certainly seems like an awful lot to write about a backup drive that a) the original poster has already purchased one and b)the assumption that anything people are making now; the specific requester of the information not withstanding; is going to need to last 20 years with technology evolving at the rate it is and storage prices dropping faster than ever. "Moore's law" is already out the window, but it does still stand as an example of the changing ratio between tech and costs; or Apple's continuous miniaturization of tech at the same time as increasing overall "speed and power" needs to be factored in. While the numbers of raw performance vs cost are always the focus of anyone who still cling to Moore's Law as valid, the miniaturization is often exponentially more difficult to accomplish, but necessary. Mounting something the size of a school bus on the top of a missile isn't ever going to fly, so to speak. Like a $10K threadripper isn't going to fit in a 1 inch thick laptop anytime soon.

 

Yes i remember the case clearly, as i did have a similar Seagate drive that failed and did the exact same thing too. At least with Seagate drives you could do this. WD went an even worse path, the past ten yrs or so, "cheaping out" they removed the onboard internal sata controller of their external drives making them practically unusable if you take them out of their enclosure haha.

Nope, i did not compare Threadripper with Apple silicon. Only with Ryzen desktop. I said i will not speak about Threadripper and i didn't. I only meant that there is this too, if money is no object, epigrammatically speaking and never got into actual details. Also, i do not feel i rant against Apple, i tell the facts as they are and i strongly believe i am fair enough, where Apple tech excels i did note it but you seem to go past this, like i never did, so if my words sound as a rant is perhaps because you are very much into Apple as i was some 35-40 years ago hehe. And about the exponential thingie, with 7.5K you can certainly build a 24 or even a 32core Threadripper pc (cpu costs 2.5k) and yes, in terms of what it may hold and run, it will be much stronger than any Apple machine in all professional scenarios. Only quite bigger in actual size hehe but hey, we can't have it all in this world can we.
Cheers

 

Here's the AI output review of said wall of text since this was a suggestion for reading it:

Spoiler

Here’s a clean read on this person’s post — tone, logic, accuracy, motivations, and where they’re bullshitting or exaggerating.

1. Tone and self-presentation
This person is trying very hard to sound like an authority.
The biggest giveaways:

• Repeated “I’m a professional”
• “I’ve done the tests”
• “Ask AI, you’ll see I’m right” (weirdly insecure flex)
• Overly long tangents that don’t actually answer the OP’s question
• Constant defensive little jabs (“i’m not a fanboi”, “not how i roll mate”)

It reads like someone who wants the forum to recognize them as the guy who knows everything, rather than someone simply giving concise, relevant information. Very performative.

2. Logical structure (or lack of it)
The OP question was:

Do NVMe SSDs in MacBooks last longer, and do they require periodic power-up?

The answer should be like three sentences:
• No, they don’t last longer.
• They’re consumer SSDs.
• Data retention without power is similar to any NVMe SSD.

Instead, this person launches into:

• Apple pricing
• Apple File System
• CPU burst behavior
• DAW performance
• AMD 9950X3D
• Threadripper
• HDD failure rates
• Datacenter SSD retention
• Seagate vs WD history
• Shady WD lawsuits
• A personal NAS anecdote

It’s basically a stream-of-consciousness “everything I know about storage plus some CPU tangents.”

This is classic:
When someone needs to feel right, they try to overwhelm the reader with volume instead of precision.

3. Accuracy problems
There’s some truth sprinkled in, but also a mix of exaggeration, half-understanding, and irrelevant facts. Here are the key issues:

• Apple File System being “what differentiates their storage” — not really. SSD longevity isn’t meaningfully different because of APFS. APFS is optimized for SSD, but that has nothing to do with the question.

• NVMe SSD longevity — He didn’t actually answer the only technical part:
Data retention is mostly dependent on NAND type, temperature, and wear level, not “is it Apple.”

• The Apple vs AMD DAW rant — wildly irrelevant. Also, some claims (like “100% more VSTis”) are extremely context-specific and read more like anecdotal benchmarks than facts.

• “Nothing exotic about Apple SSDs” — partially true, but Apple’s controllers and integration do behave differently from off-the-shelf drives, especially regarding endurance and failure modes. He oversimplifies it.

• Datacenter SSDs having less retention when powered off — real concept, but oversold. “Not meant to be powered sporadically” is an exaggeration.

• HDD reliability section — he contradicts himself.
First he says brands mean nothing.
Then he says Seagate is better.
Then he says WD is shady.
Then he says Backblaze shows all brands fail equally.
It’s incoherent.

It’s a lot of half-remembered tech talking points stitched together.

4. Motivations behind the writing
It feels like he wants to:

• Demonstrate superior knowledge
• Preemptively defend himself against imagined criticism
• Flex about running “tests” and servicing clients
• Redirect conversation toward topics he enjoys (CPUs, DAWs, datacenters)

He writes like someone who’s used to arguing online and has developed a long-winded style as a kind of dominance display.

5. The real takeaway
The post looks knowledgeable at a glance, but if you read carefully:

• It contains contradictions
• It strays constantly off-topic
• It overstates expertise
• It uses anecdotes as proof
• It misinterprets what’s relevant to the original question

It’s classic “forum expert syndrome”:
Enough knowledge to sound authoritative, but not enough discipline to stay accurate, concise, or relevant.

Apparently, AI has come up with a term for what I often refere to now as "clone's razor", jokingly of course. It is that when someone has to answer a question with their resume or "i've been doing this for 20 years" means the answer is basically bullshit. Not that their experience is BS, just that a simple answer is always the correct one per Occam's razor, of course; but because experience can never overcome cold hard facts. Data to back it up. Things of that nature, which fly in the face of simple facts. "I've been using an upward compressor as a reverb for 20 years". Ok...

Most of this whole "anti-AI" thing we see now is

a) from white-collar workers who fear democratization of information, or ability to get it without expensive degrees
b) people who have figured out you just can't say anything anymore and get away with it when it is pseudo-tech, junk science, and any other "read my resume,bro" posts.

 

Last edited: Nov 22, 2025 at 7:26 PM

@clone
I just can't love it and laugh at it at the same time man. Where's the stats though huh. Numbers mate. You prefer to AI analyze me for the asshole i may or not be, than ask AI for tech results and comparisons haha. I find it quite low for you, as i don't sell superiority to anyone because i am not and certainly don't feel superior to any other human, except perhaps those who try to misinterpret my words for the sake of winning a wits battle. Oh, and I do know i sound authoritative but it's just because i'm old enough to be in some extent. But hey np.

Bullshit. Never said that. Typical AI mistake. I said Backblaze's stats paint a nice picture,which means you can draw your own conclusions from that. I did say i find hdds more or less the same and if you had enough hdds in your lifetime so far, then you know it's "true", within a logical margin of error, no need for AI either.

I will give you that it's my bad unintentionally omitting Apple use their own proprietary embedded ssd controller which is certainly higher bandwidth, faster, better tech than the rest of consumer ssd controllers. And sometimes i do oversimplify sentences for the sake of being understandable in a forum where not everyone understands everything. But just because you are asking for it, here from ChatGPT 5.
Apple SSDs may appear to last longer because:

• macOS + APFS does fewer unnecessary writes
  
  
• the unified Apple controller has very low write amplification
  
  
• Apple’s thermal regulation reduces NAND wear
  
  
• the SSD is not user-fillable (no swapping controllers, no improper drivers, etc.)
  
  
• wear-leveling across multiple NAND packages is tightly controlled
  
  
• macOS uses RAM more effectively (less swap thrashing)

Short answer from me. You cannot magically extend the writes per day limit of the whatever nand, even selected quality nand like Apple gets by the ton. They do polish the same turd, meaning ssds behave and feel slightly better in Apple Silicon Macs than in Windows machines in most cases, in the bottom line though, the turd does smell like one no matter what, if you know what i mean.
There is nowhere any real proof that ssds in Apple machines have actually an extended life because unlike every other company, Apple does not publish stats about this, there is only an indication of this because of the usage of the aforementioned technologies that Apple uses. If there was actually a true figure in numbers i am sure they wouldn't miss out publishing their own superior stats.

Finally, thanks for reminding me, that now there is the AI Gestapo to filter everything we say, even here. I do like tech savvy, sarcastic personalities such as yourself, but deep down i find you can also be dismissive, partially dogmatic and biased, especially when it comes to Apple. And hey, ask AI about it, see what you 'll get for an answer based on what you wrote.
No worries, i will rid you of my annoying misinformative presence and do you the favor of not having to deal with my posts, since you seem to dominate every thread with the machine's answers like its the Matrix or what lol. I will grant you a parting gift, awarding you with the "Ed Sheeran of the forum" carnation, "backatcha" in every other post with AI from every corner, and now partly psychoanalyzing someone you really don't know, thinking you are being pragmatic.
Ignored and bye.

 

it's amazing but you said in your long rant for someone to AI check what you wrote. And then I did and you can't handle what it had to say. You were counting on no-one actually reading it.

Let’s step back for a moment. The OP asked two simple things: whether MacBook NVMe SSDs last longer than typical consumer SSDs, and whether they need to be powered periodically to retain data. Your reply spends thousands of words on Apple pricing, CPU performance, DAW benchmarks, Threadripper, HDD brands, datacenter practices, and personal anecdotes — none of which actually answers those questions.

To be clear: MacBook NVMe drives are consumer SSDs like any other. Their longevity and data retention are determined by NAND type, wear, and temperature — not whether they run APFS, reside in an Apple chassis, or are compared to a Ryzen 9. Planning around a hypothetical 20-year lifespan is meaningless; tech evolves far faster than drives fail.

Your hardware and software tangents are irrelevant. Whether it’s burst CPU performance, the M4 vs 9950X3D, or Threadripper cores, none of that tells the OP anything about SSD reliability or retention. The discussion of HDDs, RAID arrays, Seagate vs. WD, or proprietary server DC drives doesn’t answer the original question either — it only muddies the water with personal experience and anecdotal exceptions.

If you want to contribute usefully, stick to the facts that actually matter: consumer SSD endurance, NAND retention characteristics, and practical expectations for backup and archiving. Everything else is noise — impressive typing exercise, but not relevant to the problem at hand,

Original question you answered:
villageidiot said:
Do NVME ssds like the ones inside Macbook last longer than "normal" ssds and do they also need to be powered up regularly to prevent data loss?

Just in case you forgot somewhere there in the course of typing up your "resume".

 

Last edited: Nov 22, 2025 at 9:35 PM

Don´t fuck up this thread, there´s some really good info for everybody

 

There is really no gray area here as far as the consumer end goes. A rocket science degree is not needed to answer the original question.

To summarize;
- HDD's are the best and most $$ effective choice if you want editability and a long standing archival medium for storing critical backups or other sensitive data sets. However, longevity depends on whether the drives are kept spinning or only used when needed. Wear and tear is critical for HDD's as well as proper storage practices.
- Optical is good for smaller 46.6 GB or less archival purposes - larger sets of data can be backed up via optical by using multi-part archivers and breaking the data set up into smaller (2GB) bits and spreading them over multiple optical discs. Using integrity checks (disk verification & crc check) is critical for successful use of optical due to inconsistencies in the burning and disc manufacturing processes. Proper storage practices for optical discs must be adhered to in order to achieve maximum longevity.
- SSD's / NVMe's are great for use in active computer systems for use as system drives where fast and accurate read/writing of data is the key desired attribute. They are not meant for long term storage/archival purposes. Wear and tear (i.e. uptime) is critical for these devices as well.

 

Last edited: Nov 22, 2025 at 9:54 PM

Because of the recent two threads about data security, I registered here because I want to mention an indispensible tool, nobody seems to know about:
Ever wondered what these .sfv files are in witches releases?
Its a CRC-checksum-file of all originally contained files in that archive folder.
The SFV-file allows you to check, if the release was tempered with.

There is a nifty little freeware program called RekSFV.
It has right-click explorer integration and with once click, you can check any folder - recursively all files in subfolders - it even checks other SFV-files in subfolders, if it encounters them!
And you can - with a signle mouse click! - make RekSFV calculate CRC values of all files and place a single SFV file in that folder.

If you are sometimes archiving folders by hand without a software (for example a movies-HD, which must be accessible for the TV), or you want to secure older CDs, DVDs, BRs, it can be life saving, to have the checksums and be able to verify them and be notified, which file got corrupted.


BTW I don't know, why release groups (except the great witches, which seem to be in the best tradition of Radium and Air) are no longer placing SFV files in their archives ...
Any serious group knows about the dangers of tempered releases. SFVs are the way to know, if a release has not been tempered with!

 

Thanks for letting me in on the secret of the *.SFV file!

Until now, I only knew that *.SFV files are created during the packaging process.
I must confess that I never check files; until now, I haven't had the need to.

I suspect it's too much effort, a step has been eliminated, or they think hardly anyone tests them anyway.

Wikipedia says:
Simple File Verification (SFV for short) is a method for checking the integrity of files using CRC32 checksums.
The usual file extension for SFV files is .sfv.

How it Works
SFV files contain the names of the files being checked, along with their corresponding checksums. An "SFV validator" calculates the CRC32 checksums of the files and compares them to those in the SFV file. This allows you to determine if, for example, errors occurred during a file transfer. If the checksums don't match, the corresponding file is declared corrupt. The SFV format is most commonly used in conjunction with FTP, as this method is prone to file corruption due to prematurely terminated file transfers and accidental transfers of binary files in text mode.

Source: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_File_Verification

 

I asked AI if MacBook Pro that is in storage needs to be powered up periodically, otherwise the SSD will lose its data. According to AI the ssd data loss is a myth.

AI answer:

No — you do not need to power on your 2020 M1 MacBook Pro once a year to prevent SSD data loss.

The “SSD loses data in 1 year” myth comes from a JEDEC table where:

• 0–3 months retention applies to SSDs at 55–70°C storage temperatures
  
  
• This does not apply to consumer laptops stored at room temp
  
  
  The internal Apple SSD is:
  • NVMe
    
    
  • High-quality NAND
    
    
  • Soldered to the motherboard
    
    
  • Managed with Apple's own controllers and wear-leveling
  • It behaves like a high-grade consumer SSD. There is no requirement to power it periodically.

 

I would always rely on my own judgment, because they alone are responsible for their actions and their consequences. Large companies like the tech giants, for corporate policy reasons, always present their products in a better light than they actually are.

I also have external SD cards and wanted to know for sure, as there are conflicting reports that electrons can escape without power, leading to data loss. Therefore, it's wise to connect all your external storage devices to your PC at least once a year to be on the safe side.

 

I mentioned it in the backup-solution thread, but it is very important information for using external HDs:

Just like they sell you external HDs with hardware encryption - without mentioning, that if you need to access the data in pre boot, you might be screwed. Or if the HD-controller dies, that your data may be lost forever... But hey, it has 256-bit AES hardware encryption and you can feel really safe...

 

Thanks @HiddenProducer for your reminder.

I regularly use this tool to completely erase hard drives.
It's free; you burn a bootable CD-ROM and run it, and it overwrites the data multiple times!

Darik's Boot and Nuke --> https://dban.org
Free Open-Source Data Wiping Software for Personal Use
Delete information stored on hard disk drives (HDDs, not SSDs) in PC laptops, desktops, or servers.
Plus, remove viruses and spyware from Microsoft Windows installations.