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Upgrading 2013-2015 Macbook Pro SSD to M.2 NVMe
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Just bought a Crucial P1 1TB x4 drive. They're new to the market and priced really well at $170.
Waiting on that and an adapter and hopefully everything goes well with my Mid 2014 15" Pro.
Waiting on that and an adapter and hopefully everything goes well with my Mid 2014 15" Pro.
Hi everyone,
Has anyone tried to install a dram-less SM2263XT-based SSD into a macbook before? I've attempted to use such one (HP EX900) with a green adapter of eBay, but with no avail - my 2013 air did not detect this ssd.
Pins on the adapter were isolated with capron tape, and mac has been upgraded to high seirra (and later to mojave) prior to experiments.
Has anyone tried to install a dram-less SM2263XT-based SSD into a macbook before? I've attempted to use such one (HP EX900) with a green adapter of eBay, but with no avail - my 2013 air did not detect this ssd.
Pins on the adapter were isolated with capron tape, and mac has been upgraded to high seirra (and later to mojave) prior to experiments.
Did you format it properly in Disk Utility? You might to select ‘show all devices’.
Hi everybody,
I've recently discovered this thread which made me decide to upgrade my 2013 macbook air with an intel 760p drive.
I could have lived very well without the possibility to put the mac to hibernation, but unfortunately the battery drain during sleep varied massively. Sometimes, it took 3 % overnight and sometimes it took 50 %, which was rather annoying - especially since I travel a lot and like to have at least some reliable standby.
Therefore I looked for easy options for a bootrom update and tried the approach that was already proposed a few months ago by vk2fro which basically contains of using a small piece of hardware that plugs into the diagnostic port on the logic board. I did not choose the one from macunlocks, but rather a "matt card", which can easily be flashed by using a SOIC8 clip. Everything else I did as described by gilles_polysoft, i.e. using UEFI tool to merge the NVMe driver from a newer firmware into my mac's firmware and afterwards flashing this firmware to the matt card.
Long story short: it worked as expected, can easily be undone/redone with newer firmware if needed and the risk of bricking the mac due to mistakes when accessing its original rom chip is basically non-existent. On the con-side, of course it was an additional cost of 60 EUR for the matt card...
Thanks again for this interesting thread, especially to gilles_polysoft for figuring out the details of the NVMe driver in the bootrom and dosdude1 for his ROMTool which also was very helpful.
I've recently discovered this thread which made me decide to upgrade my 2013 macbook air with an intel 760p drive.
I could have lived very well without the possibility to put the mac to hibernation, but unfortunately the battery drain during sleep varied massively. Sometimes, it took 3 % overnight and sometimes it took 50 %, which was rather annoying - especially since I travel a lot and like to have at least some reliable standby.
Therefore I looked for easy options for a bootrom update and tried the approach that was already proposed a few months ago by vk2fro which basically contains of using a small piece of hardware that plugs into the diagnostic port on the logic board. I did not choose the one from macunlocks, but rather a "matt card", which can easily be flashed by using a SOIC8 clip. Everything else I did as described by gilles_polysoft, i.e. using UEFI tool to merge the NVMe driver from a newer firmware into my mac's firmware and afterwards flashing this firmware to the matt card.
Long story short: it worked as expected, can easily be undone/redone with newer firmware if needed and the risk of bricking the mac due to mistakes when accessing its original rom chip is basically non-existent. On the con-side, of course it was an additional cost of 60 EUR for the matt card...
Thanks again for this interesting thread, especially to gilles_polysoft for figuring out the details of the NVMe driver in the bootrom and dosdude1 for his ROMTool which also was very helpful.
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I've tried to, but it doesn't appear in disk utility at all, as well as in device manager when I boot into macOS from a usb.
SSD is 100% working - tested on a PC and in a usb-to-m.2 adapter.
nope
Done! Sandisk ultra is the usb flash drive I use as bootable at the moment.
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Interesting. How did you write the modified bootrom on the Matt card? Was any special hardware except an SPI programmer needed? For the programmer I plan to use a Raspberry Pi.
Are you sure it isn't something such as clogged fans (dust) or possibly dry thermal paste? I recently cleaned out the fans and cleaned/re-applied thermal paste on my gf's late 2013 13" MBP and it is much quieter compared to how it was previously.
As for your comment, I've had no problems with noise on my system. 2015 15"/2.5ghz/(dGPU)R9 M370X model. I am using a 512GB Samsung 960 Pro (along with the long Sintech adapter) with it. Fans only spin up when I do something that uses the gpu or a benchmark. Otherwise it is silent.
Definitely not clogged fans - didn't get into thermal paste though.
Are we sure the thermals are the same with a 970 EVO vs a 960 PRO?
For some reason I think I recall reading that the 970's ran hotter/drew more power, etc?
(I could be misremembering - but perhaps part of the story)
Just to be clear, my 2.8 370x wasn't noisy with the stock SSD.
I've been doing benchmarking on this 2.2ghz and I can't get the fans to spin up no matter what I do.
Have any recommendations on what I might try?
Love to test it further!
A couple days and a bunch of work in and I haven't heard the fans on this thing one single time, even with my 4k monitor plugged in (which used to turn my 370x machine into a hair dryer after 10 mins)
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Do you mean the preparation of the modified bootrom image? Or the flashing of the matt card? Or the entire process?
I do not have a fully fledged documentation, but I'll link my main sources below (with the most important one being of course this entire thread):
- General SPI programming using a raspberry pi: There is quite some information out there - I just googled a little and read several pages regarding this topic. This guide boils it down to the most important steps required here: https://www.rossmanngroup.com/board...ite-erase-apple-efi-spi-rom-with-raspberry-pi. Since I assume you speak german, this page contains some more general information about the SPI interface of the RPi and might be helpful to get a better understanding of what we are actually doing here: http://www.netzmafia.de/skripten/hardware/RasPi/RasPi_SPI.html
- Modifying the bootrom: As written above, I mainly followed the procedure described by gilles_polysoft in this post https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/2034976/page-52#post-26067118. I only replaced the direct J6100 connection to the logicboard with a SOIC8 connection to the chip on the matt card - in the image below you can see that it is very well accessible on such a card.
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I think there is a little misunderstanding - you don't need some "donor" mac with native NVMe support.
Exactly.
I'm very sorry. I read many comments about performance and very small power consumptions of ADATA SX8200 but I want to ask only one question - is ADATA XPG GAMMIX S11 supported?
Maybe someone have a positive experience using it?
I have the opportunity to buy only this type of SSD memory.
Thanks in advance!
Maybe someone have a positive experience using it?
I have the opportunity to buy only this type of SSD memory.
Thanks in advance!
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Are you happy with the Samsung 960 Pro? Any issues, Kernel panics or other problems? Thanks a lot!
Hi, I'd like to ask for some advice. I have a MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013), MacBookPro11,2.
I'd like to upgrade the built-in storage to something bigger, but only if it can work without kernel panics and sleep/hibernation issues. I don't want to do any kind of SPI flashing or anything like that.
Also, I'd like to upgrade the OS in the future, without disassembling my computer, just like I can upgrade OS with the stock drive.
Is there any adapter/SSD solution for my use case, or right now all of them are not 100% reliable?
I'm using this computer for work and travel, and I want to make sure that if I upgrade to a big drive, it'll work as reliably as it works now. What do you recommend?
I'd like to upgrade the built-in storage to something bigger, but only if it can work without kernel panics and sleep/hibernation issues. I don't want to do any kind of SPI flashing or anything like that.
Also, I'd like to upgrade the OS in the future, without disassembling my computer, just like I can upgrade OS with the stock drive.
Is there any adapter/SSD solution for my use case, or right now all of them are not 100% reliable?
I'm using this computer for work and travel, and I want to make sure that if I upgrade to a big drive, it'll work as reliably as it works now. What do you recommend?
I’ve installed exactly this model, but I’ve previously upgraded the original ssd to mojave. Have you already installed it? What about the performance? See my posts from page 111... I was expecting better write speeds.
My understanding is you still need modified boot rom unless it’s a 2015 model to get sleep working. The ssubx drives are nvme pcie x4 where the stock drives for pre 2015 were pcie ahci x2.