Hello

Recently, I upgraded my LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt 2 hard drives to SSD…having recently bought a M1 MacBook I am going to get some USB C rugged hard drives, but want to put the SSD from the old LaCie’s into the new one…however I need to know beforehand whether I can actually open the USB C one up to swap the harddrive out as I can’t find anything online indicating you can

Is this possible

Thanks

 

you will be able open one with a small Phillips head screwdriver. What you do after that, I don't want to comment upon.

 

I don't know specifically this model of SSD, but while in past even "fixed" USB HDD were in many cases using standard SATA interfaces, now they probably use a layer of proprietary hardware, so they make difficult or impossible to change SSD/HDD.

As @clone said, open and see what you find.
Also at times screwdrivers are useless because you can find glued/soldered cases.

 

You can, they're regular 2.5" HDDs inside even for the USB-C variant if I remember correctly

 

I had a 2TB Mech drive fail, and they didn't ask for the case back under warranty. So I dropped a 1TB SATA SSD straight into it. It was easy and works great.

 

Yes they are :

 

so even if I buy a 500gb will a 2tb still work in it, considering the size is greater

 

At that point why not just get a rugged enclosure? And yes it'll work.

 

why?
just keep those older ones, and get new USB-C (3.2 gen 2 ~ 10Gbit) M.2/NVME enclosure for really cheap and put M.2/NVME SSD in it - much better performance than outdated SSD tech,
ruggedness with SSDs is more of a marketing nonsense, it just adds size to the enclosure making it more vulnerable to damage simply because being bigger and more bulky

 

Yeah, its about the physical size of the drive.. a Sata interface is a Sata interface doesn't care what capacity drive it has plugged into it

 

put a thunderbolt 2 -> thunderbolt 3 adapter on the ones you have for like 30 bucks. there is no point in buying a brand new drive just for it's case. I said you can open these, because I looked at one physically. It doesn't mean this is not a bad idea/waste of good money. What is a bad idea, is telling someone to modify something that you think they will break and then turn around and blame you for helping them do it. Also, that particular adapter from Apple often fail.

Other than possible mechanical defects (with any drive), those usb-c Lacies will keep up with anything you throw at them from your MacBook. Kontakt, Falcon2, 50+ stems in Logic, whatever.
Especially when you aren't doing anything which even requires 0 latency; which OP is not.

 

Last edited: Mar 26, 2023