I want to remove the NAND storage from a water-damaged M1 laptop and get the data somehow. I don't want to buy another laptop to swap them into because we already replaced the machine. Does anyone make an enclosure that will control them? Is there a USB drive that uses the same chips?
[Re-Titled by Moderator]
MacBook Air (M1, 2020)
dckesler wrote:
I want to remove the NAND storage from a water-damaged M1 laptop and get the data somehow. I don't want to buy another laptop to swap them into because we already replaced the machine. Does anyone make an enclosure that will control them? Is there a USB drive that uses the same chips?
That's not going to happen.
Those chips are soldered in. They're not on any sort of removable module, let alone a standard M.2 NVMe SSD for which USB and Thunderbolt enclosures are readily available.
Even if you could unsolder the chips and solder them to another board, all Apple Silicon Macs encrypt most of the data on their internal SSDs in real time. The encryption and decryption keys are held within the Apple Silicon chip. (In your case, a M1 chip.). As long as the Apple Silicon chip and the flash chips are kept together, the encryption doesn't pose an obstacle to reading the SSD. But separate those chips from the encryption/decryption keys, and now the contents of the flash chips are so much hash.
dckesler wrote:
I want to remove the NAND storage from a water-damaged M1 laptop and get the data somehow. I don't want to buy another laptop to swap them into because we already replaced the machine. Does anyone make an enclosure that will control them? Is there a USB drive that uses the same chips?
That's not going to happen.
Those chips are soldered in. They're not on any sort of removable module, let alone a standard M.2 NVMe SSD for which USB and Thunderbolt enclosures are readily available.
Even if you could unsolder the chips and solder them to another board, all Apple Silicon Macs encrypt most of the data on their internal SSDs in real time. The encryption and decryption keys are held within the Apple Silicon chip. (In your case, a M1 chip.). As long as the Apple Silicon chip and the flash chips are kept together, the encryption doesn't pose an obstacle to reading the SSD. But separate those chips from the encryption/decryption keys, and now the contents of the flash chips are so much hash.
This could be a very expensive lesson to learn, but you should always have frequent and regular backups of your computer and all external media (including the cloud) which contains important & unique data. This is very easy to do since Apple includes the Time Machine software with macOS.
Thanks. I could handle the soldering, but definitely not the encryption.
NAND data recovery from water-damaged MacBook Air
