Macdctr, thank you for this reply and thank you for so much other helpful comments about NVMe! I 'took the plunge' last week and so far so good. This thread motivated me to attempt the upgrade and it helped me do planning for each stage of the upgrade.
In case this might be helpful here's my account:
I have Y2013 11-inch MacBook Air (model number A1465). Upgraded from Sandisk (128GB) product to Samsung SM951 (512GB) product...
Paid c. $180 for SM951, which had been listed on eBay as 'lightly used'. After installing my SM951 drive I saw in smartctl output c. 250 GB read, c. 250 GB written, 148 error-information log entries. I found a link that says SM951 endurance rated at 150TBW and so the 250+250 numbers do indeed some consistent with 'lightly used'. The high number of error-information log entries is alarming for me though, for what it's worth, I did find a site where someone says error-info data are just informational (i.e., high number is not indicative of failure)... During this past week (week one of my own use of my refurb product) I've tracked EI entries and I've tracked power-on hours. During my use of my SM951 refurb, power-on hours have nearly doubled (moving from 66 to 128) and there's zero new EI entries (i.e., 148 entries -- all accrued before I bought my drive off eBay!)
My experience of adapters has been annoying lol. I purchased on eBay one unit of the small green adapter that Mactdctr recommends (not the adapter that Macdctr bought for self). eBay says transit time will be one month though and so a few days later I purchased a different adapter on Amazon... Whereas the eBay adapter is small + green the Amazon adapter is long + black. [I think my Amazon buy is the 'C' model]. Helpful site: <
www.pc-adapter.net> N.B.: The small+green adapter from eBay comes with P5+T5 screwdrivers but the long+black adapter from Amazon does not come with screwdrivers.
Installation was easy but not quite smooth. I'm bad with my hands and so, going in, I felt intimidated... My one occasion of difficulty occurred towards the end. First I placed in the laptop the long+black adapter and then I placed in the adapter the SM951 storage unit... Had to push firmly when attaching each piece... The drive, however, would not stay flat once attached to the adapter. Kept popping up, kinda like a plank. Plus: Height of SM951-drive-atop-long+black-adapter is too much for the small T5 screws that I had on hand. [One of those screws being the one that came with my laptop and the other screw being the one that came with the long+black adapter.] Finally I decided to cut off a portion of the long+black adapter (making it closer in length to the short+green adapter) and sure enough this works well! I worried perhaps the long part contains circuitry but indeed it seems to be just cardboard! [N.B. I don't have kapton tape. I don't know much about kapton tape. Seems relevant to this paragraph though.]
On the software side things have been smooth except for one thing: I did indeed have trouble after putting the laptop to sleep. Sometimes I saw black screen. Sometimes I saw reboot screen. Not immediately after the start of a sleep phase but rather after several hours' sleeping... Based on what other folks have said 'standby' is the important thing here. The following command works well for me: `sudo pmset -a standby 0 hibernatemode [0|3|25] autopoweroff 0`. For testing variations of the prior command, the following command, which serves to active sleep immediately, seems handy: `pmset sleepnow`. These links have been helpful for me: <
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/260578/difference-between-sleep-hibernate-etc> <
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...ssd-to-m-2-nvme.2034976/page-54#post-26101551> <
https://www.lifewire.com/change-mac-sleep-settings-2260804>
Hope this helps!
Questions:
(a) Macdctr, your posts in this thread contain links to more than one eBay page... One link points to the small green adapter that you bought. One other link points to a different small green adapter, which is the product you recommend in response to someone's questions... The description for **your recommended** adapter states the product is compatible with Samsung 950 Pro. However the description for **your own** adapter does not assert compatibility with Samsung 950 Pro -- and yet that's the setup you've gotten to work. The page for your adapter makes no claims of 950Pro compatibility even though it is indeed compatible with 950Pro. Do you any opinions/interpretations?
(b) Ya think Apple would refuse to replace a MBA battery if the MBA contains NVMe storage?
