How or can I add to Apple M1 Max chip 512GB SSD storage on Mac Studio?

Clemnacious wrote:

Internal storage expansion is not supported at the present time. The closest thing is to purchase a fast 512GB SD card and use it in the front SD slot. About $70 US, not bad.

I do not recommend the approach. SD card storage is not considered permanent enough.

ThunderBolt connection give you the equivalent of a PCIe bus on a wire. Connecting to ThunderBolt enclosures is so fast, you can use one the hold a graphic card if you like. (I am not suggesting that as a solution, just pointing it it is FAST.)

Still far faster than rotating magnetic drives, and faster than most SSD speeds, a USB-C enclosure running at USB-3 speeds works great and is less expensive.

Apple has not formally said if it can be upgraded.

As you may know there is two storage sockets in the studio and it appears that the largest storage module is 4TB so the max of 8TB would be two, 4TB modules. It also appears that the modules are just storage chips with no controller, The standard SSDs include a controller. The controller for the Studio storage is on the logic board.

There are YouTube videos of users trying to switch and add modules but they were no successful. They even tried using the Apple Configurator 2 App since that is required to add/change storage modules in the 2019 Mac Pro desktop.

As of now there’s no way to upgrade on board storage. May

never be.

Your best option would be a Thunderbolt 3 drive. SSD or much

better a NMVe Thunderbolt drive. Keep in mind that MVMe drives vary in speed.

A slower but cheaper solution would be USB drive

So, bottom line, no, you cannot add SSD storage to a Mac Studio. None of the M series Macs have user upgradeable internal storage. Buy what you can afford and/or add external storage later.

Internal storage expansion is not supported at the present time. The closest thing is to purchase a fast 512GB SD card and use it in the front SD slot. About $70 US, not bad.

You can easily add EXTERNAL enclosures with storage, is I suggest you not obsess with getting additional storage inside the box.

Buy a new one. Fairly simple. You knew up front that it could not be upgraded. 128G RAM and 8T SSD sounds pretty full.

I disagree based on real experience. We've used SD cards in 2015 MacBook Pro models for years as convenient data storage. No problems. You can quote Thunderbolt specs all you want, but it is irrelevant to my post and irrelevant to the OP''s query.

Yeah, that would work, but not if you are interested in speed of access to data.

Isn't it nice the Original Poster has a choice of different alternative ways to add storage to their Mac.