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Question for future proofing... is there any way to update the BootROM without opening the case up again and swapping the original ssd back in? Like could you boot from an external drive and update it in some way? My bootROM is the most recent version right now but I'm not looking forward to doing lots of swapping every time there is an update. Thanks!
Which MacBook do you have?

When I updated from 10.14 to 10.14.1 with my 2015 Air and Intel 600p, the bootrom was also updated.
 
Which MacBook do you have?

When I updated from 10.14 to 10.14.1 with my 2015 Air and Intel 600p, the bootrom was also updated.

2015 15" MBP 11,4. That's good to hear that it updated even with your replacement drive. I guess I will have to wait and see how things go when Catalina comes out.
 
Hello all, I've left this thread for a few months since I've completed my drive replacement and haven't had any major issues.


The only outstanding thing I've got to say is that my Mac updated itself to 10.14.5 on the third-party drive when I was reinstalling macOS to solve some issues regarding Keychain.

I installed Mojave on the original drive then the third-party drive as I read somewhere in this thread that the original was required to perform updates (I don't recall which post it may have been).
Therefore, I found it strange when I saw the latest version installed on my Mac. Has Apple changed anything or did I just get lucky in a way?

Would love to hear thoughts on this or some information I may have missed.

Here's my post from nine months ago on what I upgraded to in case anyone was wondering.
 
Hi all! Haven't posted here before but figured this would be the best place to start with my current SSD-related drama.

I was getting fed up of only having 128GB of space on my Early 2015 13-inch Macbook Pro, so after a bit of looking around I went for a 480GB Transcend JetDrive 825 - though having read this thread I see now that might not have been the best idea!

However after I performed a Time Machine backup, opened up the laptop to swap the SSDs and booted back up into recovery, I ran into a problem that I've not been able to fix. I can't see the drive listed anywhere, either in Disk Utility or by running "diskutil list". I double checked the drive by taking it out and putting it into the provided Thunderbolt enclosure and macOS could see it with no problem, but after putting it back into the M.2 slot again Disk Utility couldn't see it.

Some other things I've tried:
  • Cloning the existing SSD using Carbon Copy Cloner - the drive still isn't seen by the Macbook, so I get a folder with a question mark
  • Formatting the drive as both APFS and HFS+ - neither of these seem to work
  • Installing an older version of macOS onto the Jetdrive - tried this with both Yosemite and High Sierra, both could not be seen
  • Installing macOS on an external drive, booting to the external drive and cloning onto the JetDrive in the M.2 slot - suggested by Transcend's support, OS booted fine on the external drive but still couldn't see the JetDrive in disk utility
  • I also used a bootable Linux USB to see if the drive could be seen, but again it doesn't show up at all
My suspicions are that there's something missing in the way of firmware that's stopping the drive from being seen in the M.2 slot, but doesn't affect it in the Thunderbolt enclosure. However macOS was fully up to date already, and there was no newer firmware available for the JetDrive.

Sorry for the long post, I'm reaching the edges of my ability/temper with this and now I don't really have a usable Macbook, so I would be very grateful if anyone had any other insight ideas! Thanks in advance!
 
Hello all, I've left this thread for a few months since I've completed my drive replacement and haven't had any major issues.


The only outstanding thing I've got to say is that my Mac updated itself to 10.14.5 on the third-party drive when I was reinstalling macOS to solve some issues regarding Keychain.

I installed Mojave on the original drive then the third-party drive as I read somewhere in this thread that the original was required to perform updates (I don't recall which post it may have been).
Therefore, I found it strange when I saw the latest version installed on my Mac. Has Apple changed anything or did I just get lucky in a way?

Would love to hear thoughts on this or some information I may have missed.

Here's my post from nine months ago on what I upgraded to in case anyone was wondering.
The original drive may be required for bootrom updates rather than os updates. There have been reports of users receiving os updates with nvme drives but not bootrom updates.

My 2015 Air has received bootroom and os updates with an HP ex900 since 10.14.1. I installed the public beta of Catalina and it received another bootrom update.
[doublepost=1561146133][/doublepost]
Hi all! Haven't posted here before but figured this would be the best place to start with my current SSD-related drama.

I was getting fed up of only having 128GB of space on my Early 2015 13-inch Macbook Pro, so after a bit of looking around I went for a 480GB Transcend JetDrive 825 - though having read this thread I see now that might not have been the best idea!

However after I performed a Time Machine backup, opened up the laptop to swap the SSDs and booted back up into recovery, I ran into a problem that I've not been able to fix. I can't see the drive listed anywhere, either in Disk Utility or by running "diskutil list". I double checked the drive by taking it out and putting it into the provided Thunderbolt enclosure and macOS could see it with no problem, but after putting it back into the M.2 slot again Disk Utility couldn't see it.

Some other things I've tried:
  • Cloning the existing SSD using Carbon Copy Cloner - the drive still isn't seen by the Macbook, so I get a folder with a question mark
  • Formatting the drive as both APFS and HFS+ - neither of these seem to work
  • Installing an older version of macOS onto the Jetdrive - tried this with both Yosemite and High Sierra, both could not be seen
  • Installing macOS on an external drive, booting to the external drive and cloning onto the JetDrive in the M.2 slot - suggested by Transcend's support, OS booted fine on the external drive but still couldn't see the JetDrive in disk utility
  • I also used a bootable Linux USB to see if the drive could be seen, but again it doesn't show up at all
My suspicions are that there's something missing in the way of firmware that's stopping the drive from being seen in the M.2 slot, but doesn't affect it in the Thunderbolt enclosure. However macOS was fully up to date already, and there was no newer firmware available for the JetDrive.

Sorry for the long post, I'm reaching the edges of my ability/temper with this and now I don't really have a usable Macbook, so I would be very grateful if anyone had any other insight ideas! Thanks in advance!
You confirmed that the MacBook is running the latest bootrom?

Have you tried booting into internet recovery to see if disk utility detects the drive?
 
You confirmed that the MacBook is running the latest bootrom?

Have you tried booting into internet recovery to see if disk utility detects the drive?

Thanks for the reply! I've checked my BootROM version and it's 184.0.0.0.0, and my SMC version is 2.28f7, both of which seem to be correct for my Macbook.

I've tried both standard and Internet recovery and I can't see the drive in either, sorry I probably should've mentioned this in my first post!
 
Thanks for the reply! I've checked my BootROM version and it's 184.0.0.0.0, and my SMC version is 2.28f7, both of which seem to be correct for my Macbook.

I've tried both standard and Internet recovery and I can't see the drive in either, sorry I probably should've mentioned this in my first post!
You are welcome.

The disk utility version is the version included with the latest version of Mojave?

Have you tried installing from a 10.14.5 usb installer? I doubt it will make any difference.

Are you able to install the os to the drive while it is installed in an enclosure?

Are you able to try the drive in another MacBook?
 
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Hi all! Haven't posted here before but figured this would be the best place to start with my current SSD-related drama.

I was getting fed up of only having 128GB of space on my Early 2015 13-inch Macbook Pro, so after a bit of looking around I went for a 480GB Transcend JetDrive 825 - though having read this thread I see now that might not have been the best idea!

However after I performed a Time Machine backup, opened up the laptop to swap the SSDs and booted back up into recovery, I ran into a problem that I've not been able to fix. I can't see the drive listed anywhere, either in Disk Utility or by running "diskutil list". I double checked the drive by taking it out and putting it into the provided Thunderbolt enclosure and macOS could see it with no problem, but after putting it back into the M.2 slot again Disk Utility couldn't see it.

Some other things I've tried:
  • Cloning the existing SSD using Carbon Copy Cloner - the drive still isn't seen by the Macbook, so I get a folder with a question mark
  • Formatting the drive as both APFS and HFS+ - neither of these seem to work
  • Installing an older version of macOS onto the Jetdrive - tried this with both Yosemite and High Sierra, both could not be seen
  • Installing macOS on an external drive, booting to the external drive and cloning onto the JetDrive in the M.2 slot - suggested by Transcend's support, OS booted fine on the external drive but still couldn't see the JetDrive in disk utility
  • I also used a bootable Linux USB to see if the drive could be seen, but again it doesn't show up at all
My suspicions are that there's something missing in the way of firmware that's stopping the drive from being seen in the M.2 slot, but doesn't affect it in the Thunderbolt enclosure. However macOS was fully up to date already, and there was no newer firmware available for the JetDrive.

Sorry for the long post, I'm reaching the edges of my ability/temper with this and now I don't really have a usable Macbook, so I would be very grateful if anyone had any other insight ideas! Thanks in advance!


Defective. Send it back, get a refund, and buy one of the drives recommended in the first post of this thread.

If that's not possible, have a read of the Amazon reviews for troubleshooting hints - both .com and .co.uk. Here are some:

"6 hrs later and after persuading my Apple Savvy mate to come look, we eventually traced it to the fact that the new SSD had not been formatted with the correct file system ready for installing into a Mac. Anyway its all up and running now after we managed to format it correctly "

"So I installed the SSD and booted up my macbook into the Mojave USB i had made to make a fresh install. however the SSD was greyed out and had an error saying that the SSD was not GUID.So I went back to the main menu and opened Disk Utility. If you try to erase the drive it gives you an option to rename and choose the format. this doesnt work. what I did was click on view in the left corner and select 'show all devices'. now the drive comes up as a bunch of letters and numbers. if you when click erase you can then choose the name, format (Mac OS Extended journaled), and scheme which should be GUID."

"Bizzarely for a “mac-specific” kit; partition-scheme was MBR. I was installing OSX fresh from USB media, so had to drop into the prompt; first: ”diskutil list” to get the dev # - (disk0 in my case) - then: “diskutil partitionDisk /dev/disk0 GPT JHFS+ Mojave 0b” - where “Mojave” = name of new drive. Lucky I do this stuff for a living. Poor preparation by Transcend."
 
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Hey guys,

I've updated to Mojave and backed up everything using time machine.

Replaced the original apple ssd for my new sabrent rocket with the long sintech adapter. When I boot up holding cmd+R, the new disk does not show up anywhere even if I run $diskutil list.

Now I've realized that if I follow the steps to install os, it's actually trying to install OS X Mavericks. Isn't my efi updated? Shouldn't I be all set after updating to Mojave? I was using High Sierra previously anyways.

Hope you can shed some light as I'm quite lost!
[doublepost=1561220864][/doublepost]
Hey guys,

I've updated to Mojave and backed up everything using time machine.

Replaced the original apple ssd for my new sabrent rocket with the long sintech adapter. When I boot up holding cmd+R, the new disk does not show up anywhere even if I run $diskutil list.

Now I've realized that if I follow the steps to install os, it's actually trying to install OS X Mavericks. Isn't my efi updated? Shouldn't I be all set after updating to Mojave? I was using High Sierra previously anyways.

Hope you can shed some light as I'm quite lost!
Nevermind, I was missing alt, the correct key combination was: cmd+alt+r
 
You are welcome.

The disk utility version is the version included with the latest version of Mojave?

Have you tried installing from a 10.14.5 usb installer? I doubt it will make any difference.

Are you able to install the os to the drive while it is installed in an enclosure?

Are you able to try the drive in another MacBook?

Sorry for the delay, managed to leave my charger at work so had to go and grab it!

I created a new 10.14.5 USB installer and still can't see the drive in Disk Utility, I would assume that creating a new USB means I'm using the latest version.

I am able to see the JetDrive in the enclosure, and I managed to install both High Sierra and Mojave onto it like this, but as soon as I put it into the m.2 slot in the MacBook it doesn't show up at all. This is why I'm wondering if there's something missing from either the drive or the MacBook that means it can't be detected in the m.2 slot, but unfortunately I don't know anyone with a Macbook that'll take the SSD so I'm not really sure what else to try. :(
 
Sorry for the delay, managed to leave my charger at work so had to go and grab it!

I created a new 10.14.5 USB installer and still can't see the drive in Disk Utility, I would assume that creating a new USB means I'm using the latest version.

I am able to see the JetDrive in the enclosure, and I managed to install both High Sierra and Mojave onto it like this, but as soon as I put it into the m.2 slot in the MacBook it doesn't show up at all. This is why I'm wondering if there's something missing from either the drive or the MacBook that means it can't be detected in the m.2 slot, but unfortunately I don't know anyone with a Macbook that'll take the SSD so I'm not really sure what else to try. :(
It could be a bad adapter.
 
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It could be a bad adapter.

The JetDrives don't come with adapters, they're designed to fit the proprietary slot type for the Apple SSDs, unless you think it might be an issue with the slot itself?

71FKM%2BMTKNL._SX425_.jpg


I'm currently waiting for Transcend to get back to me and see if they have any ideas, but failing that I'll probably return it if possible as RedTomato suggested, and try a different SSD mentioned at the top of this thread.

Thanks again for helping me out, let me know if you have any more ideas :)
 
The JetDrives don't come with adapters, they're designed to fit the proprietary slot type for the Apple SSDs, unless you think it might be an issue with the slot itself?

71FKM%2BMTKNL._SX425_.jpg


I'm currently waiting for Transcend to get back to me and see if they have any ideas, but failing that I'll probably return it if possible as RedTomato suggested, and try a different SSD mentioned at the top of this thread.

Thanks again for helping me out, let me know if you have any more ideas :)
My apologies. I incorrectly assumed the drive had a standard nvme connector.

Is it possible that the drive needs a firmware update?
 
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My apologies. I incorrectly assumed the drive had a standard nvme connector.

Is it possible that the drive needs a firmware update?
No worries! And that was one of my first thoughts, but I installed the manufacturer's software and it said the firmware for the JetDrive is the latest version.

I'm kind of thinking something's missing on the MacBook itself that's stopping it from seeing the drive, but I suspect Apple will be reluctant to help me given what I'm doing...!
 
I was thinking around this but in my model chip is somewhere on downside of logic board, so it has to be disassembled and I don't really know if it could be recognized by programmer without power adapter connection as almost all who successfully upgrade theirs bootrom's explaining here

One of the guys few pages before says about program 'Volta'
I have tried as well now I am using undervolted processor -95mV and my temperature is 10 degrees less in acition and battery life improved really too much its like ~1 hour more with the same usage as I had before
Soon will try to make a tests to see exactly how much better this parameters with this app, but its amazing for now.

I've managed to have everything working fine: restart, reboot and sleeping (no hibernation). You were right, I have tried using Volta undervolting 95 mV and limiting cpu power to 2 W and I let it sit overnight. Battery dropped 1% in 8h! We can extrapolate to about 3-5% a day. I think it's not that bad, all things considered.

My read/write speeds increased by a factor 10 and 4 respectively. Booting up takes a lot less and same goes for copying files to/from external hdd and time machine. I'm really happy with the overall performance. Much faster for a decent price (80e sabrent rocket 512GB + 25e long sintech adapter + 13e pentalobe & torx screwdriver set) and so far not too much battery life degradation.

I was considering to get the SPI adapter to modify the bootrom but if the battery performance is the same in the next months, I honestly see no reason to do so. I am not missing hibernation thus far.
[doublepost=1561296402][/doublepost]
Hi all! Haven't posted here before but figured this would be the best place to start with my current SSD-related drama.

I was getting fed up of only having 128GB of space on my Early 2015 13-inch Macbook Pro, so after a bit of looking around I went for a 480GB Transcend JetDrive 825 - though having read this thread I see now that might not have been the best idea!

However after I performed a Time Machine backup, opened up the laptop to swap the SSDs and booted back up into recovery, I ran into a problem that I've not been able to fix. I can't see the drive listed anywhere, either in Disk Utility or by running "diskutil list". I double checked the drive by taking it out and putting it into the provided Thunderbolt enclosure and macOS could see it with no problem, but after putting it back into the M.2 slot again Disk Utility couldn't see it.

Some other things I've tried:
  • Cloning the existing SSD using Carbon Copy Cloner - the drive still isn't seen by the Macbook, so I get a folder with a question mark
  • Formatting the drive as both APFS and HFS+ - neither of these seem to work
  • Installing an older version of macOS onto the Jetdrive - tried this with both Yosemite and High Sierra, both could not be seen
  • Installing macOS on an external drive, booting to the external drive and cloning onto the JetDrive in the M.2 slot - suggested by Transcend's support, OS booted fine on the external drive but still couldn't see the JetDrive in disk utility
  • I also used a bootable Linux USB to see if the drive could be seen, but again it doesn't show up at all
My suspicions are that there's something missing in the way of firmware that's stopping the drive from being seen in the M.2 slot, but doesn't affect it in the Thunderbolt enclosure. However macOS was fully up to date already, and there was no newer firmware available for the JetDrive.

Sorry for the long post, I'm reaching the edges of my ability/temper with this and now I don't really have a usable Macbook, so I would be very grateful if anyone had any other insight ideas! Thanks in advance!

I've had something similar happen to me yesterday. When you get into recovery what keyboard combination did you use?

For some reason, when I was holding cmd+R the recovery tool was the one from Mavericks. I then tried cmd+alt+R and booted into Mojave's which showed my ssd and I was able to format it and then transfer all files from time machine.
 
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I've had something similar happen to me yesterday. When you get into recovery what keyboard combination did you use?

For some reason, when I was holding cmd+R the recovery tool was the one from Mavericks. I then tried cmd+alt+R and booted into Mojave's which showed my ssd and I was able to format it and then transfer all files from time machine.

I've tried both of the recovery options but unfortunately I can't see the SSD in either of them. I think at this rate my best bet may be just to send it back and try something else!
 
I've managed to have everything working fine: restart, reboot and sleeping (no hibernation). You were right, I have tried using Volta undervolting 95 mV and limiting cpu power to 2 W and I let it sit overnight. Battery dropped 1% in 8h! We can extrapolate to about 3-5% a day. I think it's not that bad, all things considered.

My read/write speeds increased by a factor 10 and 4 respectively. Booting up takes a lot less and same goes for copying files to/from external hdd and time machine. I'm really happy with the overall performance. Much faster for a decent price (80e sabrent rocket 512GB + 25e long sintech adapter + 13e pentalobe & torx screwdriver set) and so far not too much battery life degradation.

I was considering to get the SPI adapter to modify the bootrom but if the battery performance is the same in the next months, I honestly see no reason to do so. I am not missing hibernation thus far.
[doublepost=1561296402][/doublepost]

I've had something similar happen to me yesterday. When you get into recovery what keyboard combination did you use?

For some reason, when I was holding cmd+R the recovery tool was the one from Mavericks. I then tried cmd+alt+R and booted into Mojave's which showed my ssd and I was able to format it and then transfer all files from time machine.
Volta for now, its a biggest solution after bootrom update this app really gives about 40-60 min but still if you are using mbp not so often than its still drains a lot comparing 'no drain' with proper hibernation
cheap way to update bootrom is ch341a and soic8clip but as I understand only 15' 2013-2014 have their chips on front side of logic board while my 13' has it on down side of logic board so for now I didn't find information about how its working with disassembled logic board

p.s. I gave a try with limiting cpu power to 2W its too laggy while watching streaming video even in 720, found out that for this usage supposed to be up from 7w otherwise its too laggy
 
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I all,

I have a Macbook Air Mid 2013 with 128GB and would like to update it with the Samsung MZ-M6E1T0BW SSD 860 EVO MSATA, 1T, 2.5" SATA III.

a) Which adapter to choose?

b) Will I have problems with the sleep mode? (I use it all the time and dontt want to miss it.)

Thanks guys :)
 
I all,

I have a Macbook Air Mid 2013 with 128GB and would like to update it with the Samsung MZ-M6E1T0BW SSD 860 EVO MSATA, 1T, 2.5" SATA III.

a) Which adapter to choose?

b) Will I have problems with the sleep mode? (I use it all the time and dontt want to miss it.)

Thanks guys :)
You can't use any sata III drive. You need a nvme drive.

You can't use deep sleep or hibernation mode 25 with your MacBook.

I recommend the short, black Sintech adapter.
 
Volta for now, its a biggest solution after bootrom update this app really gives about 40-60 min but still if you are using mbp not so often than its still drains a lot comparing 'no drain' with proper hibernation
cheap way to update bootrom is ch341a and soic8clip but as I understand only 15' 2013-2014 have their chips on front side of logic board while my 13' has it on down side of logic board so for now I didn't find information about how its working with disassembled logic board

p.s. I gave a try with limiting cpu power to 2W its too laggy while watching streaming video even in 720, found out that for this usage supposed to be up from 7w otherwise its too laggy

Well, I would use this low power setting before putting it to sleep to sort of emulate hibernation.

I have been looking to find out about how to update the bootrom in a 2014 13" because of what you mentioned about the rom chip being on the keyboard side of the board. So if anyone else has succeeded on this and could report the procedure I would really appreciate it!
 
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I have a mid-2015 15” MBP running Mojave with a Sabrent Rocket 2TB drive with the Sintech adapter.

I wanted to report power usage while sleeping. Using defaults, I closed the laptop and set it on the counter overnight. It started with 100% battery that has about 480 cycles on it. It was closed for 8 hours and went down to 98%. Will report back in a couple more hours when I get to the office to see what it’s at.

At 8 hours into sleep without power connection it was 98% as I stated above. I opened the lid, looked at it, and closed it again. It has now been 3 hours later and it has gone down another 3% to 95%.

I'm guessing that it must have went into hibernation overnight. Not sure what the default time is for that, I'd have to look at what it's set for I'm pmset. See below..
Screen Shot 2019-06-26 at 8.50.51 AM.png
 
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I have a mid-2015 15” MBP running Mojave with a Sabrent Rocket 2TB drive with the Sintech adapter.

I wanted to report power usage while sleeping. Using defaults, I closed the laptop and set it on the counter overnight. It started with 100% battery that has about 480 cycles on it. It was closed for 8 hours and went down to 98%. Will report back in a couple more hours when I get to the office to see what it’s at.

At 8 hours into sleep without power connection it was 98% as I stated above. I opened the lid, looked at it, and closed it again. It has now been 3 hours later and it has gone down another 3% to 95%.

I'm guessing that it must have went into hibernation overnight. Not sure what the default time is for that, I'd have to look at what it's set for I'm pmset. See below..
View attachment 845157

Based on your settings I think it enters hibernation after 10800 seconds, which is exactly 3h. That's the default value.
 
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