I have been testing so many different NVMe drives in MacBook Air and Pro since OS X 10.13. I think I found the perfect drive now. Adata SX 8200 Pro . I have been configuring pmset, different adapters and sometimes this has been a real puzzle. I installed this drive a couple of weeks ago in a 2014 MacBook Pro. I get 5GT/s and X4 lanes. Hitting R/W speeds of 2300/1900 MB/s. I guess I would get even better speeds in a MBP 2015. (on my ThinkPad I got 2900 MB/s!) This time I did not touch pmset settings! I have had no problems with sleep and the performance is amazing. The SX8200 Pro is even cheaper than the non-Pro model but not as cheap as Samsung 970 EVO but I concluded that the MBP anyway does not utilize the 970s speed. The Adata inlcudes a simple heat sink. The Adata SX8200 runs much cooler than the 970 and on the spec sheet should use about half as much power. So I am impressed. I use the small green Sintech adapter. Tried the long black one but can't tell any difference.
Wow, I though that all pre 2015 models have standby/hibernate issues with NVME unless flashing with modified firmware that contains the DXE driver.
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On a side note, I'd like to know why NVMEs consume more battery power than stock OEM drives on 2013-2014 MBP, I looked at gilles_polysoft's chart and it seems like drives like sx8200 and 760p are far more efficient than the apple OEM drives with the exception of a 0.3W increase in idle power consumption, so if you get something that uses even less power on read/write/average like the Sabrent, then shouldn't we be getting better battery usage than with the OEM SSD? Or are the Apple SSDs in the chart not representative of what is in the 2013 and 2014 models?
I was wondering the same thing so they are definitely getting less battery life then OEM drives?
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I have an MF843LL, early 2015 13" Macbook Pro with stock Apple 512GB SSD. This SSD is very fast, reading & writing at 1500MByte/s according to benchmarks. Now I upgraded to a Samsung PM961 1TB NVME using the sintech adapter. To my dismay the read speed has not improved and the write speed is worse @ 1200MByte/s. In this thread there is mention of 4k sectors, will the performance improve using 4k sectors instead of 512 byte? I checked the performance both in Mac OS latest version and Bootcamp W10 x64 using the latest Samsung NVME driver. I understand this notebook has PCI Express 2.0 with 4 lanes so I am not expecting it to perform like the newer Macbook Pros with PCI Express 3.0 4x, but this was a bit of a surprise. Any hints?
Based on other reports and Gilles benchmarks it seems that 3rd party MVME drives run around that speed on PCIe 2x4 Macs. Don’t believe any Samsung drives can be formatted 4kn and don’t think it would make a difference.
[doublepost=1554149930][/doublepost]The benchmarks for PCIe 2x4 NVME don’t look much different than benchmarks runs on PC’s. Seems strange that your Apple OEM AHCI would put perform however.