Hey guys! Just wanted to share my experience with my SSD upgrade and also wanted to say thank you to those who contributed to this thread, as this thread helped guide me through my SSD upgrade.
My Mac is a mid-2014 MacBook Pro with Retina, 13 inch. I upgraded my original Apple 256GB SSD to a Crucial P2 1TB SSD. Prior to doing this, I had already updated to Big Sur 11.1 as it was my understanding it would be best to do so to ensure the Boot Rom was updated as well. After installing the P2 (using the recommended Sintech adapter), I did a clean install of Big Sur 11.1 from a bootable USB. After the install, I did not restore my data from a Time Machine backup or use Migration Assistant. Instead, I did a clean install of all my applications and I manually transferred over the documents/photos I wanted/needed on my new Mac (copy/paste the files from Time Machine backup drive to the new drive).
Two things I immediately noticed upon installing the new SSD with Big Sur.
- Upon restart, my computer took at least 30 seconds to power back on.
- After restarting, it boots up to the login screen and then after sitting on the login screen for a few seconds, the machine restarts again and then boots back up the login screen and then it is fine. The weird thing is that it only does this when Filevault is enabled. If I disable FV, it does not do this. But if I re-enable it, it does it again. Also, it only does the double restart on restart, NOT on shutdown.
I contacted Apple Support and they were unable to provide any assistance, so I provided them with log files and waited to hear back. I never heard back, and at the same I time I became more frustrated with the long restart times and the restart/boot twice issue, so I decided to start over again and this time do a clean install of Catalina using a bootable USB, as I had not had this issue prior to Big Sur.
Upon installing Catlina, I wanted to make sure everything worked fine before re-installing all my apps and manually transferring over all my data again, so I tested the restart function several times, both with FileVault enabled and disabled. The restart no longer took 30 seconds to power back on (instead it did it immediately, or took a few seconds at most), and the restart/reboot twice issue was gone, regardless if Filevault was on or not.
For now I will be remaining with Catalina, as it will still be receiving security updates, does not have the above described issues, seems to be faster and not as cluand I actually enjoy the appearance/use of it more than I did of Big Sur (or maybe I just didn't use Big Sur enough to get use to it). I am still unsure if the above issues were caused by compatibility issues between Big Sur and my model Mac, or if it had to do with my new SSD, or some other weird combination.
Now the only issue I am having is I am unable to Bootcamp my new SSD. After the Bootcamp files download and the Bootcamp partition is created, Bootcamp restarts my computer and I boot into the Windows EFI partition to begin the Windows install process. It makes it through part of the install process until it gives me an error. I can't remember now exactly what the error said, but it involved the Windows blue screen with a sad face. I searched Google and tried everything I could find, including using a 8 GB USB 2.0 flash drive, and installing previous smaller Windows 10 ISOs instead of the newest ISO available from the Windows site. No matter what I tried, I got the same error. I know I'm not alone, as I have seen others in this thread with the same model who are having the same issue. I thought I saw somebody just recently say they fixed it by using a USB 2.0 flash drive, but unfortunately that didn't fix it for me. Anyways, I got around the issue by installing Windows 10 on my old Apple Samsung SSD and using that as an external bootable drive, so now I can just boot into Windows 10 from my old SSD.
Regarding battery life, I have not installed any additional kexts like Lilu or NvmeFix (and I know from reading posts that my model Mac doesn't work with ssdpmEnabler), and my battery life still appears to be at least the same (or maybe even better) as it was before with the old SSD. I do not have any power stat apps installed and therefore I do not have any data to share regarding that.
I also installed a 2TB WD SN550 SSD in my wife's 2017 MacBook Air. She is running Big Sur 11.2 and does not appear to have any issues so far like what I described above. The only weird thing I can think of is while using Photoshop, she has had Photoshop freeze (spinny beach ball wheel) a few times while making brush marks on a photo. When this happens, I check Activity Monitor and it shows her CPU usage as 157% of the CPU (which doesn't make sense because you'd think the most it could be is 100%), so something weird is obviously happening, but I don't think its SSD related (I think its more of a Big Sur/Photoshop bug/compatibility or just her not-so-great processor in the computer). I asked her about battery life and she says she thinks its as good or even better than before (but I take that with a grain of salt, given the other posts from people on here who installed the same SSD and had reported they needed to install the additional kexts to get the same battery life as before - I have not done anything like that on her computer yet and probably won't unless she starts to complain about the battery life.)
Regarding speed- both seem to be fast when copying/transferring files. The copies/transfers definitely seem to take less time than before. I don’t have any speed test data to provide.
That's all I have! Just wanted to say thanks again to all those who contributed. Pretty sure the above issues might be isolated to just my machine, as I haven’t seen anyone else post any similar experiences. Regardless, wanted to share as it may help somebody else.