Upgrading 2013-2015 Macbook Pro SSD to M.2 NVMe

[Useful]

do the later versions of macOS require a fast SSD? i am on montery and my ssd is 600mb/s read and write, and the loading of the apps at startup is slow.

should i upgrade to an SSD that has 1200 mb/s read and writes and will it make a difference?

 

[EugW]

do the later versions of macOS require a fast SSD? i am on montery and my ssd is 600mb/s read and write, and the loading of the apps at startup is slow.

should i upgrade to an SSD that has 1200 mb/s read and writes and will it make a difference?

Sequential load times are pretty much irrelevant. Your old drive probably has poor random read/write speeds.

 

[Don_H]

Hi, I’ve just registered to this forum to say thank you for the detailed information in this thread and share my experience and findings.
While I would describe myself as a technically inclined person, I had to spend quite a bit of time to research.
Here are my steps, hopefully saving you some time:

My setup
Macbook Pro Retina Mid 2015 15”
MacOS 12.7.6 Monterey

Things I got for upgrading
Hynix P31 Gold NVMe SSD 2TB
QNINE M.2 NVMe SSD Adapter (Short adapter, Sintech wasn't available here in Germany)
External USB NVMe Case


Swapping the SSD drive

1. I put the new SSD in the enclosure, plugged it in and formatted it to APFS.
2. I booted into Recovery Mode and used Disk Utility to Clone my existing internal Macintosh HD on to my new Drive via usb. (Select new drive and click “Restore”). Note: I had to run “First Aid” on all volumes and containers, before Disk Utility was able to clone.
3. Took apart the USB SSD enclosure and my Macbook (you’ll likely find a lot of dust - good time to take a moment and clean it), disconnected the battery and replace the SSD. The iFixit instruction was helpful.
4. Closed macbook up again, boot up, et voila!

Everything’s working nicely, with a lot more storage now and about 6x speed improvement at writing, almost 2x at reading. Read & write both maxing out at about 2800 MB/s (Before it was write: 470 MB/s and read: 1490 MB/s) All measured with Blackmagic Disk Speed Test.


Further improvements (power saving)

From what I’ve read in this thread, macOS or my MacBook Pro does not natively support NVMe power saving features.

To make sure the energy consumption at sleep and in use is as optimised as possible, I installed OpenCore Legacy Patcher as suggested in the first post here.
(This installs/injects lilu and NVMeFix.kext via GUI. Apparently SSDPMEnabler’s Power Management functions are included in NVMeFix now, so you don’t need to get SSDPMEnabler, too)

I don’t plan on using OCLP for it’s main function (that is to run newer-than-supported macOS versions) so I didn’t have to create an installer. OCLP works by injecting kernel extensions via a boot loader instead installing them directly. You can read more about this on the project’s page at https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher

If you’re not familiar with OCLP (which I wasn’t) these are the steps you should take if you want to keep running Monterey but manually installing kernel extensions is a bit over your head (which it was for me):

To get the needed NVMeFix kernel extension via OCLP these are the steps I took:

1. Downloaded and installed the latest OpenCore-Patcher.pkg from https://github.com/dortania/Opencore-Legacy-Patcher/releases
2. in OpenCore-Patcher.app I went into [Settings], made sure the “3rd Party NVMe PM” and “APFS Trim” was enabled in “Extras” tab. (See screenshot of this in the first post of this thread). Also in the tab “App” I selected “Allow native models”, because I want to keep using the original macOS Monterey.
3. Next I clicked [Build and Install OpenCore] -> Install to Disk -> (keeping going) -> Reboot, hold option and select the EFI Boot. Directly afterwards the boot selection screen shows up again, this time the only option is the standard macOS, which boots up automatically.
4. After booting I opened up OCLP again, clicked [Post-Install Root Patch], depending on what you used OCLP for and what machine you’re on you might have to [start root patching]. In my case it said that “No patches (are) required”.

Power usage results

I really should have tested this before OCLP and even before that with the Apple SSD, but after patching I installed iStat Menus to get the following readings of the SSD amperages ( Amps times 3.3 V for wattage):

Booted up, Idling: 60-80 mA (~ 0.2 W - 0.26 W)
Simulated office use, browsing, moving smaller files: 200-300 mA (0.66 W - 0.99 W)
Heavy use with Blackmagic Disk Speed Test: 500-600 mA (1.65W - 1.98 W) average with peaks up to around 800 mA (2.64 W)
(Temperatures were 35°C at idle and plateau-ed at 45°C when in heavy use by Disk Speed Test after a few minutes.)

Comparing to the charts in the first post, this looks really good. I’m happy with that!


Battery consumption during standby-sleep

I don’t know if there’s a better way of testing, but just looking at the charge percentages I’m losing about 5-6% in standby over night (Default "Hibernate Mode: 3"). The battery is half a year old and still at 99% health.

I have a feeling this is slightly higher than before, but as I’ve mentioned, I didn’t check before the conversion or patch, so I have no data to compare.

 

[elsid]

Registered just to share my experience.
First of all great thanks to everyony taking part of making these cool devices live more.

Macbook Air 2017, long adapter from aliexpress, WD sn580 NVME.
Upgrade was made to be able to create second partition of reasonable size to install Linux (I need it for my hobby projects) in dual boot. Original 128GB disk wasn't big enough for this task.

Everything seems to work normally. Here are couple of problems I faced:
1. Disk coulnd't be detected by system.
The problem was that I actually tried to check this disk from recovery system which is Sierra I believe. This system is too old to detect NVME as I could find out. Preparing bootable USB with Big Sur weas efficient enough to solve this problem. Disk was detected and I installed system on it without any problems.
2. Installing process takes some time.
Don't try to begin it at 12AM in Monday like "How much can it take? An hour?". Flashing USB, installing NVME, installing system, several reboot between them... Well, next morning at work was not pleasant.

 

[EugW]

Hi, I’ve just registered to this forum to say thank you for the detailed information in this thread and share my experience and findings.

Best first post ever! 🤓

Congrats! Great results. I was tempted to do the same with the SK Hynix P31 Gold for my daughter’s 2015 MacBook Pro, but I had already previously upgraded her stock 128 GB SSD to 256 GB using an OEM Apple Samsung drive and it turns out after all this time she still only uses 60 GB total.

 

[jmac90]

Hi all, I’ve just registered to this forum looking for advice on the issues I have been having after upgrading my 2015 MacBook Air’s internal ssd for storage from the original 128gb to a Crucial P2 1TB ssd. Thanks to all who contribute here and I sincerely appreciate all the guidance here and any assistance would be greatly appreciated!

Background:
-About 1 year ago after putting a lot of research into how to do this upgrade, and after reviewing this thread’s original post info, I decided to attempt this upgrade as I was constantly running out of storage. I settled on the Crucial P2 1 TB ssd with a Sintech (long) adapter. I upgraded the MacOS from El Capitan to Mojave and finally to Monterey. I followed all of the steps carefully and the install went smoothly. After it was complete, my macbook was running smoothly, starting up without issue, and even sleeping/hibernating without issue.

Not too long afterwards though I began to have crashes after hibernation. The battery life also seemed to take a reduction from preinstall. Eventually, the battery even became noted as “service recommended”. But starting up and shutting down still wasn’t any issue, and I had read that a minority of users had issues with hibernation and battery life, so I just continued to use the computer and always fully shut down instead of just closing the lid.

Now however, starting up the computer after a crash or having shut down is almost impossible. The loading bar at startup almost always slows to a stop, gets, stuck, and the screen blacks out with a flash. I am only able to get the computer started up after MANY attempts, whether plugged in or not, and fully charged battery or not. Everything works while started up with no issues, but obviously I need to fix this now as it has gotten bad.

Things I have tried so far:
-Updated MacOS so that the boot ROM would update to the latest version
-This post haha. See below for all system info, pmset -g output, last panic report file, and black magic disk speed test

-I looked into updating the ssd firmware, but crucial’s support page only gives two upgrade options:
“If your Crucial P2 SSD currently has firmware P2CR010, you will upgrade to P2CR012.
If your Crucial P2 SSD currently has firmware P2CR031, you will upgrade to P2CR033.”
My drive has neither of those firmware versions, it has P2CR048, so I’m not sure if I can update it further. I didn’t want to start an installation of windows on my mac yet since it seemed a little challenging and could have issues with that as well as noted in #8: “BootCamp installation issues” of this threads original post
-I have not tried physically cleaning/re-seating the ssd hardware yet. I’m doubtful that could fix all these issues as I was extremely careful with the install, and don’t want to risk any more problems with that before I cover all other possibilities, including potentially trying an install with the old ssd or a different new ssd.
-I have not installed istat to check the temperature yet.
-I have not tried the kexts/open core legacy patcher yet

All stats below:

MacOS: Monterey v12.7.6 (originally El Capitan, then Mojave before the ssd upgrade last year)
Mac: MacBookAir7,2
Processor: Dual-Core Intel Core i5 1.6 GHz
Boot ROM/System Firmware Version: 489.0.0.0.0
SSD: Crucial P2 M.2 2280 1 TB (firmware version: P2CR048) + SinTech NGFF M.2 NVME long adapter)

pmset -g output:

pmset -g output - Pastebin.com

Pastebin.com is the number one paste tool since 2002. Pastebin is a website where you can store text online for a set period of time.

pastebin.com

I tried adding a panic file to pastebin for review, but it got deleted?

What’s my best course of action? What would you do in my shoes? And what the hell is the actual problem(s) here that's causing all of the horrible startup and hibernation crashes on a 2015 Macbook Air?

I am thinking I will try OpenCore Legacy Patcher, and if I’m still having all the same issues, I’ll pop the hood and try cleaning/resetting the ssd, because at that point I’ll be so frustrated and ready to just give up and put the old SSD back in (that will hopefully work just the same as before!) or maybe try a different SSD. I’m a bit skeptical of these ssd adapters now, so if I did try a new 1 TB ssd, I’d probably try an OWC product made for MacBooks that doesn’t require the adapter. But I’m not sure those are any good anyways.

Ugh I just wanted to continue using the MacBook I like without running out of internal local storage! Sorry for the long post, and thanks again for any help.

 

[dogen]

What’s my best course of action? What would you do in my shoes? And what the hell is the actual problem(s) here that's causing all of the horrible startup and hibernation crashes on a 2015 Macbook Air?

I'd see if I can start up smoothly from an external device. If I could I'd wonder if the many crashes might've screwed up the macOS installation on the internal drive. Alternatively I might try safe mode from the internal. I'd also wonder if the long adapter might have anything to do with the crashes and failed hibernation. I might see if a short adapter would do any better.

 

[xboxbml]

Hi all, I’ve just registered to this forum looking for advice on the issues I have been having after upgrading my 2015 MacBook Air’s internal ssd for storage from the original 128gb to a Crucial P2 1TB ssd. Thanks to all who contribute here and I sincerely appreciate all the guidance here and any assistance would be greatly appreciated!

Background:
-About 1 year ago after putting a lot of research into how to do this upgrade, and after reviewing this thread’s original post info, I decided to attempt this upgrade as I was constantly running out of storage. I settled on the Crucial P2 1 TB ssd with a Sintech (long) adapter. I upgraded the MacOS from El Capitan to Mojave and finally to Monterey. I followed all of the steps carefully and the install went smoothly. After it was complete, my macbook was running smoothly, starting up without issue, and even sleeping/hibernating without issue.

Not too long afterwards though I began to have crashes after hibernation. The battery life also seemed to take a reduction from preinstall. Eventually, the battery even became noted as “service recommended”. But starting up and shutting down still wasn’t any issue, and I had read that a minority of users had issues with hibernation and battery life, so I just continued to use the computer and always fully shut down instead of just closing the lid.

Now however, starting up the computer after a crash or having shut down is almost impossible. The loading bar at startup almost always slows to a stop, gets, stuck, and the screen blacks out with a flash. I am only able to get the computer started up after MANY attempts, whether plugged in or not, and fully charged battery or not. Everything works while started up with no issues, but obviously I need to fix this now as it has gotten bad.

Things I have tried so far:
-Updated MacOS so that the boot ROM would update to the latest version
-This post haha. See below for all system info, pmset -g output, last panic report file, and black magic disk speed test

-I looked into updating the ssd firmware, but crucial’s support page only gives two upgrade options:
“If your Crucial P2 SSD currently has firmware P2CR010, you will upgrade to P2CR012.
If your Crucial P2 SSD currently has firmware P2CR031, you will upgrade to P2CR033.”
My drive has neither of those firmware versions, it has P2CR048, so I’m not sure if I can update it further. I didn’t want to start an installation of windows on my mac yet since it seemed a little challenging and could have issues with that as well as noted in #8: “BootCamp installation issues” of this threads original post
-I have not tried physically cleaning/re-seating the ssd hardware yet. I’m doubtful that could fix all these issues as I was extremely careful with the install, and don’t want to risk any more problems with that before I cover all other possibilities, including potentially trying an install with the old ssd or a different new ssd.
-I have not installed istat to check the temperature yet.
-I have not tried the kexts/open core legacy patcher yet

All stats below:

MacOS: Monterey v12.7.6 (originally El Capitan, then Mojave before the ssd upgrade last year)
Mac: MacBookAir7,2
Processor: Dual-Core Intel Core i5 1.6 GHz
Boot ROM/System Firmware Version: 489.0.0.0.0
SSD: Crucial P2 M.2 2280 1 TB (firmware version: P2CR048) + SinTech NGFF M.2 NVME long adapter)

pmset -g output:

pmset -g output - Pastebin.com

Pastebin.com is the number one paste tool since 2002. Pastebin is a website where you can store text online for a set period of time.

pastebin.com

I tried adding a panic file to pastebin for review, but it got deleted?

View attachment 2458943

What’s my best course of action? What would you do in my shoes? And what the hell is the actual problem(s) here that's causing all of the horrible startup and hibernation crashes on a 2015 Macbook Air?

I am thinking I will try OpenCore Legacy Patcher, and if I’m still having all the same issues, I’ll pop the hood and try cleaning/resetting the ssd, because at that point I’ll be so frustrated and ready to just give up and put the old SSD back in (that will hopefully work just the same as before!) or maybe try a different SSD. I’m a bit skeptical of these ssd adapters now, so if I did try a new 1 TB ssd, I’d probably try an OWC product made for MacBooks that doesn’t require the adapter. But I’m not sure those are any good anyways.

Ugh I just wanted to continue using the MacBook I like without running out of internal local storage! Sorry for the long post, and thanks again for any help.

I have 2015 MBA as well. DO NOT USE the Sintech LONG adapter!! I did same and found when I replaced the bottom back on the chassis it was pressing pretty hard down on the drive I was using. Check out sig for specs. I went with the SHORT Sintech adapter. Been working fine all along, but having long adapter and bottom pressing down will inevitably cause failures later on.. Hopefully your motherboard is still ok and no cold solder joints.. I would maybe try and get the short adapter and try it again. I ended up finally using the long adapter when I got my 2015 MBP this summer.. Good luck.

 

[Useful]

Can you figure out what is wrong with this picture?

 

[EugW]

Can you figure out what is wrong with this picture?

Is that the actual pic for the ad?

EDIT:

Ah yes, I see that it is. 🤪

 

[pullman]

My beloved 11 inch MacBook Air 2015 (7,1) has been giving me "The computer restarted because of an error" messages for a while and Etrecheck yesterday reported that the stock 500GB SSD is failing.

I'd be intrigued to down the NVME route, but I'd first like to explore native options as I depend on this Mac for work. I currently have read 1500MB/s and write 1300MB/s so I think it won't get faster than that due to the 4x lane PCIe 2.0 speed.

But which are the natively-supported options actually?

There are various models of the OWC Aura. OWC's site has a 500GB Aura Pro X2 but here in the Netherlands the only one I find is a 480GB version. OWC has a 480GB model but it's called Aura N2. Will there be a difference between these?

I've also seen comments about Transcend drives which work natively – is that right and which ones in that case?

If I can't find a reasonably-priced natively supported drive I'll go the NVME route.

Thanks in advance for your help
philip

 

[xboxbml]

My beloved 11 inch MacBook Air 2015 (7,1) has been giving me "The computer restarted because of an error" messages for a while and Etrecheck yesterday reported that the stock 500GB SSD is failing.

I'd be intrigued to down the NVME route, but I'd first like to explore native options as I depend on this Mac for work. I currently have read 1500MB/s and write 1300MB/s so I think it won't get faster than that.

But which are the natively-supported options actually?

I've read about OWC Aura but see there are various models. Checking OWC's site there's a 500GB Aura Pro X2 but here in the Netherlands the only one I find is a 480GB version. OWC has a 480GB Aura N2 which seems to be a different drive.

I've also seen comments about Transcend drives which work natively – is that right?

If I can't find a reasonably-priced natively supported drive I'll go the NVME route.

Thanks in advance for your help
philip

I've read that OWC is expensive and not as reliable as others. I have the 13". You could go the used Apple route and try and find an exact replacement, but it would be used. I did that for a very short time and filled the 512gb stock I had. Then I went with the Short Sintech adapter and the ADATA 2TB drive. See sig. Been 5 years I think now. Still running well. There are others that are cheaper and less power hungry than the ADATA. I have a SK Hynix 2TB in the 15" MBP that I got this summer. That works well too. I personally wouldn't get an OWC. Their TB dock is good that I have, but I wouldn't do their drives. Hope you have a good TimeMachine backup before it fails. It's up to you which way you go.

 

[EugW]

My beloved 11 inch MacBook Air 2015 (7,1) has been giving me "The computer restarted because of an error" messages for a while and Etrecheck yesterday reported that the stock 500GB SSD is failing.

I'd be intrigued to down the NVME route, but I'd first like to explore native options as I depend on this Mac for work. I currently have read 1500MB/s and write 1300MB/s so I think it won't get faster than that due to the 4x lane PCIe 2.0 speed.

But which are the natively-supported options actually?

There are various models of the OWC Aura. OWC's site has a 500GB Aura Pro X2 but here in the Netherlands the only one I find is a 480GB version. OWC has a 480GB model but it's called Aura N2. Will there be a difference between these?

I've also seen comments about Transcend drives which work natively – is that right and which ones in that case?

If I can't find a reasonably-priced natively supported drive I'll go the NVME route.

Thanks in advance for your help
philip

The Aura drives are not native. They're just NVMe drives with Apple connectors. And IMO they're 2nd tier quality drives, at a comparatively high cost. If you were to consider an NVMe drive, definitely do not choose Aura. Consider something like the SK Hynix P31 Gold. Just make sure you have everything backed up first and make sure you have the right tools.

If you want a native drive, then buy a used Apple OEM drive. You can buy 512 GB Apple OEM drives for not too much money these days. I thought about it for my kid's 2015 MacBook Pro, but in the end I decided against it because I had already upgraded it from 128 GB to a native OEM Apple/Samsung 256 GB drive years ago, and it turns out even the 256 GB upgrade was unnecessary. There is still only 60 GB used on that machine, since most of the apps used are cloud based.

 

[StardustOne]

I have update 2 x MacBook Air 2015 with the Fanxiang AP2000Pro 1 TB without any issues and another MBA 2013 got the 512 GB SSD from them, bought it on Aliexpress and they are direct replacements, do not have any issues with sleep mode either.

 

[pullman]

Thank you for the reply and all the information. I'm hesitant to go the second-hand route for a drive if I can avoid it. And good point re OWC's reliability. A long time ago I had one or two drives fail on me (the old Mercury Electra) so perhaps OWC would not be a great idea.

I hadn't thought of how power hungry NVMEs can be and that's clearly relevant. I'll look into how the various options compare.

Did sleep work on both your machines (they run Monterey natively right)?

 

[pullman]

Thank you very much for clarifying that, I didn't realise they aren't native. Yeah I'm rethinking the OWC option. The P31 Gold is difficult to find here in the Netherlands but I see its successor the P41 for 47 Euro for the 500GB and 79 Euro for the 1TB.

I have now placed an order for the short Sintech adapter from Sintech GmbH.

The Aura drives are not native. They're just NVMe drives with Apple connectors. And IMO they're 2nd tier quality drives, at a comparatively high cost. If you were to consider an NVMe drive, definitely do not choose Aura. Consider something like the SK Hynix P31 Gold. Just make sure you have everything backed up first and make sure you have the right tools.

If you want a native drive, then buy a used Apple OEM drive. You can buy 512 GB Apple OEM drives for not too much money these days. I thought about it for my kid's 2015 MacBook Pro, but in the end I decided against it because I had already upgraded it from 128 GB to a native OEM Apple/Samsung 256 GB drive years ago, and it turns out even the 256 GB upgrade was unnecessary. There is still only 60 GB used on that machine, since most of the apps used are cloud based.

 

[pullman]

This is really good to know, thank you. So do I understand it correctly that you just installed or cloned over macOS and then sleep "just worked"? No need for kexts or OCLP?

I'm asking because the first post in this thread is (to me) a bit unclear It says first: "Note that macOS does not natively support full NVMe energy savings on these NVMe drives. To get full NVMe energy saving features on macOS, you need either: to manually install Lilu, NVMEFix and SsdPmEnabler.kext or to install OpenCore Legacy Patcher". But further down it says that hibernation issues affect 2013-2014 laptops. I may misread this of course.

cheers
Philip

I have update 2 x MacBook Air 2015 with the Fanxiang AP2000Pro 1 TB without any issues and another MBA 2013 got the 512 GB SSD from them, bought it on Aliexpress and they are direct replacements, do not have any issues with sleep mode either.

 

[EugW]

Thank you for the reply and all the information. I'm hesitant to go the second-hand route for a drive if I can avoid it. And good point re OWC's reliability. A long time ago I had one or two drives fail on me (the old Mercury Electra) so perhaps OWC would not be a great idea.

I hadn't thought of how power hungry NVMEs can be and that's clearly relevant. I'll look into how the various options compare.

Did sleep work on both your machines (they run Monterey natively right)?

The SK Hynix P31 Gold is popular here because it is less power hungry.

To run any NVMe drive you first need to upgrade to a recent macOS version, since NVMe support was not present in earlier versions of OS X. If you're already on Monterey, then you're all set, because that means your Mac's firmware has already been updated to support NVMe drives.

Thank you very much for clarifying that, I didn't realise they aren't native. Yeah I'm rethinking the OWC option. The P31 Gold is difficult to find here in the Netherlands but I see its successor the P41 for 47 Euro for the 500GB and 79 Euro for the 1TB.

I have now placed an order for the short Sintech adapter from Sintech GmbH.

Check in the thread for people's experiences with the P41, but IMO the P31 would be preferred since it uses less power.

I didn't use either though. I had used the Western Digital SN550 in my 2014 Mac mini, but that drive is a DRAM-less drive. Sleep worked fine with the SN550.

I have update 2 x MacBook Air 2015 with the Fanxiang AP2000Pro 1 TB without any issues and another MBA 2013 got the 512 GB SSD from them, bought it on Aliexpress and they are direct replacements, do not have any issues with sleep mode either.

Just a clarification that these aren't native drives either.

 

[natus.w]

This is really good to know, thank you. So do I understand it correctly that you just installed or cloned over macOS and then sleep "just worked"? No need for kexts or OCLP?

You can try just without OCLP but power draw may vary, despite the P41’s decent efficiency you may find the draw is higher under macOS..

SK hynix Platinum P41 SSD Review: The Best Around (Updated)

The fitting successor to the popular Gold P31 is finally here

www.tomshardware.com

I'm asking because the first post in this thread is (to me) a bit unclear It says first: "Note that macOS does not natively support full NVMe energy savings on these NVMe drives. To get full NVMe energy saving features on macOS, you need either: to manually install Lilu, NVMEFix and SsdPmEnabler.kext or to install OpenCore Legacy Patcher".

If you find battery drain is problematic or SSD performance is irregular you may want to try an install and see how it holds up (there may be some or negligible difference, I cannot say as it varies between SSD/machine setups..)

But further down it says that hibernation issues affect 2013-2014 laptops. I may misread this of course.

Those issues were most pervasive prior to macOS 11.x (there was a known issue where the NVME driver was faulty; this was fixed with an EFI update contained within 11.0)

Any later updates should also have these fixes applied..

 

[pullman]

Thank you very much. Yes I saw that with Monterey the firmware issue should be sorted. I double-checked and has indeed been updated to the latest version.

I'll do a search for the P41 in the thread to see people's experiences.

Cheers
philip

The SK Hynix P31 Gold is popular here because it is less power hungry.

To run any NVMe drive you first need to upgrade to a recent macOS version, since NVMe support was not present in earlier versions of OS X. If you're already on Monterey, then you're all set, because that means your Mac's firmware has already been updated to support NVMe drives.


Check in the thread for people's experiences with the P41, but IMO the P31 would be preferred since it uses less power.

I didn't use either though. I had used the Western Digital SN550 in my 2014 Mac mini, but that drive is a DRAM-less drive. Sleep worked fine with the SN550.


Just a clarification that these aren't native drives either.

 

[pullman]

Yes that's the review I read. The P41 is not far from the P31 in many respects and the power draw is almost the same too. The thing is the P31 costs probably twice more than the P41 here in the Netherlands.

I like your idea of trying without an OCLP install first and then install it and check for differences. It'll be easy to clone the system back if it goes belly up.

Thanks for explaining the hibernation issue too.

Cheers
philip

You can try just without OCLP but power draw may vary, despite the P41’s decent efficiency you may find the draw is higher under macOS..

SK hynix Platinum P41 SSD Review: The Best Around (Updated)

The fitting successor to the popular Gold P31 is finally here

www.tomshardware.com

If you find battery drain is problematic or SSD performance is irregular you may want to try an install and see how it holds up (there may be some or negligible difference, I cannot say as it varies between SSD/machine setups..)

Those issues were most pervasive prior to macOS 11.x (there was a known issue where the NVME driver was faulty; this was fixed with an EFI update contained within 11.0)

Any later updates should also have these fixes applied..

 

[EugW]

Yes that's the review I read. The P41 is not far from the P31 in many respects and the power draw is almost the same too. The thing is the P31 costs probably twice more than the P41 here in the Netherlands.

In that case, I wouldn't get the P31 either.

The P31 at retail is usually considerably cheaper than the P41. The P31 is older and somewhat slower (at least when not used in an external enclosure), but the P31 also runs cooler according to some reviews.

The main problem with SK Hynix drives is that they don't have as much of a retail presence in some countries, so places like Canada and the Netherlands don't have proper availability, hence the sometimes ridiculous pricing.

BTW, just in case anyone is wondering, SK Hynix is one of the top 3 memory manufacturers in the world. They, along with Samsung and Micron (Crucial) are the gold standard when it comes to memory products. In fact, Apple is a major customer of SK Hynix for memory chips. However, unlike Samsung and Crucial, they don't seem to prioritize retail to consumers very much, to the point that many consumers haven't even heard of them.

 

[pullman]

Actually I exaggerated perhaps a little. The P31 Gold is only found afaik on Amazon.nl and costs 206 Euro for a 2TB version. The 2TB P41 is 119 Euro. Either is more than I'm willing to spend and also much larger than I need on this Air since I have all the files that I use it for in iCloud.

For smaller sizes I only find the P41. The 500GB version is 47 Euro which is reasonable and the same size as the drive that's failing.

I didn't know Hynix is one of the top three but I know it from RAM sticks I've bought in the past and they've performed well. And judging by the reviews at Tom's Hardware Hynix drives are really very good.

For now I'm waiting for the NVME adapter and I'll try that out with a Teamgroup MP44 I have lying around. Then I'll get the P41.

In that case, I wouldn't get the P31 either.

The P31 at retail is usually considerably cheaper than the P41. The P31 is older and somewhat slower (at least when not used in an external enclosure), but the P31 also runs cooler according to some reviews.

The main problem with SK Hynix drives is that they don't have as much of a retail presence in some countries, so places like Canada and the Netherlands don't have proper availability, hence the sometimes ridiculous pricing.

BTW, just in case anyone is wondering, SK Hynix is once of the top 3 memory manufacturers in the world. They, along with Samsung and Micron (Crucial) are the gold standard when it comes to memory products. In fact, Apple is a major customer of SK Hynix for memory chips. However, unlike Samsung and Crucial, they don't seem to prioritize retail to consumers very much, to the point that many consumers haven't even heard of them.

 

[natus.w]

Actually I exaggerated perhaps a little. The P31 Gold is only found afaik on Amazon.nl and costs 206 Euro for a 2TB version. The 2TB P41 is 119 Euro. Either is more than I'm willing to spend and also much larger than I need on this Air since I have all the files that I use it for in iCloud.

For smaller sizes I only find the P41. The 500GB version is 47 Euro which is reasonable and the same size as the drive that's failing.

I didn't know Hynix is one of the top three but I know it from RAM sticks I've bought in the past and they've performed well. And judging by the reviews at Tom's Hardware Hynix drives are really very good.

For now I'm waiting for the NVME adapter and I'll try that out with a Teamgroup MP44 I have lying around. Then I'll get the P41.

If that is the case it appears the MP44 should be more than sufficient for your usage case, you may not need to buy the P41 unnecessarily..

Teamgroup MP44 512 GB Specs

512 GB, TLC, PCIe 4.0 x4, M.2 2280

www.techpowerup.com

Teamgroup MP44 SSD Review: A Competent, Efficient Contender

Another excellent value SSD to tempt your wallet

www.tomshardware.com

 

[EugW]

If that is the case it appears the MP44 should be more than sufficient for your usage case, you may not need to buy the P41 unnecessarily..

Teamgroup MP44 512 GB Specs

512 GB, TLC, PCIe 4.0 x4, M.2 2280

www.techpowerup.com

Teamgroup MP44 SSD Review: A Competent, Efficient Contender

Another excellent value SSD to tempt your wallet

www.tomshardware.com

That drive is very similar to the Lexar NM790. Fast and relatively cool, with Chinese NAND and Chinese controller, but no DRAM.