maanantai 29. marraskuuta 2021

2021 M1 MacBook Pro SD card drive adapter upgrade

TL;DR: Miss the Transcend/BaseQI SD drive you had in your old MBP? This Adapter sits flush with the edge of my 2021 16" MBP M1 Max.

I just recently upgraded from a 2015 RMP to a 16" M1 Max. I used a Transcend jet drive SD card for Downloads, photo library, iCloud, etc. It provided seamless offloading of files that weren't workflow-critical/backed up across machines, and took pressure off my 512GB SSD. Given the cost of SSD upgrades in the new MBPros and the (re)inclusion of an SD card slot, I wanted to repeat this great bang-for-buck upgrade. But the slot in the new Macs is shallower than that of my RMBP. So I did some digging and finally found a card that works quite well -- IMO even better than the jet drive , if you prefer a card that is flush with the edge of the machine.

This BaseQi adapter was made to flush-mount Micro SD cards into early Raspberry Pis (new ones use MicroSD). But SD slots are SD slots (please come at me SD consortium working group fanboi) , and at 16mm high, it's the perfect height to sit flush with the side of the M1. It's also super-cheap at ~$15. I glued a very thin ribbon to the top of mine (and then sanded that down some more) to provide a little pull-tag. You don't need this, though, if you're comfortable pulling the card out with some fine tweezers. it's flush, so you can't lose it, and there's room on either side to gently pull it out.

https://preview.redd.it/p3adsnjsy2281.jpg?width=960&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8c6afc40c6579c97ac2e1cf80e864f29b5ab954f

I've been using this for about a week, and the SD drive seems to work seamlessly under monterey, with no issues going to sleep or waking mounted. It just looks like a second internal drive that lets you expand internal storage economically.

Finally, if you do something like this, use a quality SD card, and don't use it for working files. SD cards aren't made to be written to as frequently as SSDs are, so files that don't change a lot, or that aren't mission-critical are a good fit. That said, mine got used daily for 4+ years and never complained. Anyway, PSA, YMMV, etc. Happy Holidays!

submitted by /u/Intelinc to r/macbookpro
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