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

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The first post of this thread is a WikiPost and can be edited by anyone with the appropiate permissions. Your edits will be public.
vk2fro said:
No harm in trying grounding - I'm a bit rusty around fets, especially the tandem pair in the diagram. :)

Fan(s) going off their tits will be the dead giveaway :)
Click to expand...

Okay so the pin definitely defaults to high - it's at ~3.4v even when the system is off. Pulled it to ground via a 500Ω resistor and started the machine. Good news is that definitely triggered something. Bad news is it didn't fully boot into OSX (just hung when the progress bar reached the end) - I guess it doesn't like the ME being disabled?

I need to get some sleep now, but I'll try booting into a linux live USB and seeing if I can just use flashrom
 
Or simply try dosdude1's tool in singleuser mode - after all it can be run from the cli :)

The machine may also boot in safe mode too.

Oh my god we are so close to solving this problem - I can feel it. Once we nut out the OS loading and have a successful flash, I'll start going through my brd files and provide the testpoints for the 13" models :)

I knew it would just take a 5c resistor to circumvent apple's silliness!
 
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alex_raa said:
what's your model ?
My MBP mid 2014
Click to expand...
It seems that your power consumption is more worthy concerning... Just now I reviewed the 760p description on intel.com and I found that all power consumption data was measured under ASPM. But macOS does not support it now.
I will run win10 in bootcamp and observe the power of 960evo under ASPM later.
 
feraint said:
It seems that your power consumption is more worthy concerning... Just now I reviewed the 760p description on intel.com and I found that all power consumption data was measured under ASPM. But macOS does not support it now.
I will run win10 in bootcamp and observe the power of 960evo under ASPM later.
Click to expand...

today evening i will install back my original apple ssd to copy something that i forgot to copy... and i will run battery monitor to see the consumption. Will post it here
 
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vk2fro said:
Or simply try dosdude1's tool in singleuser mode - after all it can be run from the cli :)

The machine may also boot in safe mode too.

Oh my god we are so close to solving this problem - I can feel it. Once we nut out the OS loading and have a successful flash, I'll start going through my brd files and provide the testpoints for the 13" models :)

I knew it would just take a 5c resistor to circumvent apple's silliness!
Click to expand...
So I got into single user mode, but it wouldn't load DirectHW.kext; then tried booting into Linux, which I was able to do. Installed flashrom, and while it detected the "Flash Descriptor Override Strap pin" it said the PR restrictions still apply. Looks like most of the useful stuff lives in that 0x190000 - 0x60FFFF range.

Screenshot_20180609_140551.png
 
alex_raa said:
today evening i will install back my original apple ssd to copy something that i forgot to copy... and i will run battery monitor to see the consumption. Will post it here
Click to expand...


so... =] i think this characteristic is not the case
 
Readers, do you know about removing heatsinks? Would you please give me suggestions?

I purchased on eBay a Samsung SSUBX drive, which comes from a Mac Pro and so is enveloped (partially) by a heatsink. The width of the heatsink--in this case I use the word 'width' to refer to the small dimension -- i.e., the distance between long edges of a rectangle--is too big to fit in my 11-inch MBA (Y2013).

How can I remove the heatsink without damaging the drive?

Thanks for reading!
 
I may have another way - macunlock's "plug in EFI" chip - we can program THAT easily with an spi programmer (even the little plug in USB one) without fear of bricking the on-logic board rom. Sure its GBP $49.99 but thats cheap insurance against bricking the machine. If you mess up flashing your backed up bios to the EFI card, you simply pull the card and boot the machine. The card over-rides the on board EFI chip when in place, yet can be removed at a later time to allow the original rom to take over again. I think this is the safest method, and would mitigate people bricking their machines with raspberry pi's - you simply pull the rom card if you mess up, reflash it correctly, and end up with a easily upgradable EFI chip, without apples silly protections in place. Since there have been some reports on ghostlyhaks of people bricking their logic board using a raspberry pi, I want a safe and sane method for users of this forum to be able to fix Apple's pig headedness.

Since you program your original EFI into it (with or without modifications), your serial number will stay the same, and for all intents and purposes, the card when in place is your EFI/bootrom.

No silly diagnostic port adapters, no trying to bypass efi protection by shorting test points, just flash the chip and plug it in.
 
Thats the one - sure its expensive, but way cheaper than buying an apple SSD, and it would be easy to circumvent apple rom updates, if you keep a backup of your rom, you can stuff it back into the chip if apple tries to over-write it with a newer rom, undoing the nvme driver upgrade.

I will go first - I'll take the back off my machine and check under the SSD to confirm my board model number, then place an order during the week. As its a rather expensive little chip, I don't mind taking the first shot at trying it. If it works, its a great way for others to easily upgrade their DXE - just program and plug in.

~$100 (australian) include the chip, a pi, leads and a clip. Peace of mind know I won't brick my ONLY macbook by having a backup rom. Cheap insurance.
 
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If I believe battery monitor, with apple original SSD, activating the setting "suspend disk activity whenever possible" (my translation from French) reduces battery consumption by 25% or so. Is this setting working with third party NVMe SSDs?
 
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jpm84 said:
If I believe battery monitor, with apple original SSD, activating the setting "suspend disk activity whenever possible" (my translation from French) reduces battery consumption by 25% or so. Is this setting working with third party NVMe SSDs?
Click to expand...
The setting is available. Whether or not it actually works is harder to say.
 
vk2fro said:
I may have another way - macunlock's "plug in EFI" chip - we can program THAT easily with an spi programmer (even the little plug in USB one) without fear of bricking the on-logic board rom. Sure its GBP $49.99 but thats cheap insurance against bricking the machine. If you mess up flashing your backed up bios to the EFI card, you simply pull the card and boot the machine. The card over-rides the on board EFI chip when in place, yet can be removed at a later time to allow the original rom to take over again. I think this is the safest method, and would mitigate people bricking their machines with raspberry pi's - you simply pull the rom card if you mess up, reflash it correctly, and end up with a easily upgradable EFI chip, without apples silly protections in place. Since there have been some reports on ghostlyhaks of people bricking their logic board using a raspberry pi, I want a safe and sane method for users of this forum to be able to fix Apple's pig headedness.

Since you program your original EFI into it (with or without modifications), your serial number will stay the same, and for all intents and purposes, the card when in place is your EFI/bootrom.

No silly diagnostic port adapters, no trying to bypass efi protection by shorting test points, just flash the chip and plug it in.
Click to expand...

Thank you for your good information, first !
I have a question about a spi programmer. In order to overwrite(maybe?) modified firmware into this chip, which parts do I have more as well as the spi programmer, like a USB one? Can the chip directly be connected with the spi programmer?

I'm sorry to ask you a very silly question, but I don't have any experience on a spi programmer.
However I have a very strong desire to run into this challenge!
 
Yes you unplug the chip from the mac (it plugs into the computers diagnostic port and overrides the on board EFI) and place the clip on it to program it. If you look at the photo on macunlocks site, you can see it has accessable pins that an SOIC8 clip can connect to.

This is all you would need to program the chip (minus the 1.8V converter board in the middle of the "sandwich"

Don't worry I plan on doing a full video tutorial once I get my EFI Fast chip from macunlocks.
 

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alex_raa said:
finally
upgraded my MBP mid 2014 15" to intel 760p 1tb ssd with sintech black (long) adapter


everything looks goods, no problems. Restart, shutting down works perfect. I do not have bootcamp so can't test problems with that.
Tonight I will do long sleep for Mac and in the morning will see...
Click to expand...

Hey Alex! It's great news that you say you're not experiencing the sleep problems.

Can you please give clear feedback on what you have experienced to this far?

1. How is the battery life compared to the stock apple ssd? (How have you been experiencing it?)
2. Are you sure there are no sleep bugs present
3. Does the bottom side of your macbook feel hotter?

I'm very interested because you have the exact same macbook as me and I also want to give the 760p a go!

Thanks
 
AJBadenhorst said:
Hey Alex! It's great news that you say you're not experiencing the sleep problems.

Can you please give clear feedback on what you have experienced to this far?

1. How is the battery life compared to the stock apple ssd? (How have you been experiencing it?)
2. Are you sure there are no sleep bugs present
3. Does the bottom side of your macbook feel hotter?

I'm very interested because you have the exact same macbook as me and I also want to give the 760p a go!

Thanks
Click to expand...

1. My usual scenario is always plugged in charge adapter because i'm using heavy apps most of time and because of that i'm not have great experience with battery consumption. I'm pretty sure that is more than original apple's ssd but i can't you tell how much. For naked eye it's minus 1 or may be more hours from stock ssd

2. I'm sure that i'm not seeing this sleep-awake problem at all, but i asked above what is exact conditions of hibernate mode and no one answer... So for now i use sleep every night and every work day (when goin to work), most deep sleep was about ~ 10 hours and i didn't see any problems.
But want to note that most time my MBP is magsafe connected and my opinion is that hibernate will no work with that scenario in sleep mode. I do one attempt of experiment: plug out magsafe and left MBP in sleep for 7-8 hours and no problems was in the end.

3. I think in usual scenario is not hotter. But again i have to note that usually i use heavy apps and my MBP always very hot so i can for sure say that is not hotter than original buuuuut this is only my case

p.s. and one more thing - i haven't bootcamp. When reading this thread i see that some dudes have problems when using bootcamp
p.p.s and i'm not restoring anything from time machine, just do fresh, clean install of latest mac os (high sierra) - my opinion is that restoring from time machine my cause additional problems
 
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Hi, I've just upgraded my macbook air 13" mid-2013 with Intel 600p 512 GB.

The interesting thing is that I didn't update El Capitan to High Sierra before changing ssd. I noticed that NVMExpress section appeared in system report after one of El Capitan update. I just created bootable SD card with High Sierra installation, insert intel ssd to macbook (using long black Sintech adapter) and boot from SD card. Then I formatted new ssd to HFS+ and installed High Sierra – now it just works.

Haven't experienced problems with restart or sleep.
Speed test shows max write about 560mb/s as expected from Intel specification. Link width is 4x for some reason (may be it shows max line width of the drive, but not actual number of lanes)
 

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It turns out that my previous adapter from SZNFHK does not work well. Reboot doesn't work, so I changed to Sintech's ST-NGFF2013, then reboot works flawlessly.

By the way, does anyone had upgraded to 10.14? Does it break anything?
 
terraphantm said:
Is that the case even after the efi update?
Click to expand...
Yeah it completely doesn't communicate with the NVMe to set it to lower power mode, NVMe can save power either by the OS sends the instructions to the NVMe or setting the PCIe bus to power saving mode.
 
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