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

[weckart]

If iStat Menus is to be believed, the Adata XPG SX8200 is pretty light on the battery. Idling averages about 0.18A, maybe rising to about 0.38A if a background app/service kicks in. The absolute highest I have seen it on sustained transfers is about 1.3A. Hard drive temps range between 25ºC idling to about 37ºC transferring/downloading large files. I haven't seen it go higher than that. At 78% battery it is showing 8hrs left. This is also on a MBP 13" 2015.

 

[deadsoul]

Hi folks. I have the following problem on my MacBook Air early 2014. I have successfully installed a Samsung 970EVO, OS X High Sierra Is already installed and works without any problems but I can't get win 8 - or 10 to work. Boot Camp Assistent get through the whole process then the Mac Reboots and I choose the right partition in win 10 setup "BOOT CAMP" and format it. Then the installation Process starts and loads some windows data, but after the system is rebooted it told me "The PC was rebooted unexpected . The Windows Installation could not be go away" it is not the original sentence, I translate it :-D
Please help me!

Hi Johnneyx, I have the exact same model Macbook Air 13 2014, could you please tell me if everything is working properly, hibernation, sleep? were you able to install windows 10 properly as well? thanks in advance.

 

[Eliah]

Today I’ve upgraded the ssd on my MacBook Pro 13” early 2015 with the long black Sintech adapter together with the Samsung 970 Evo. It went flawlessly. No issues encountered. I’ve also installed windows with boot camp, also no issues.
Maybe just a little more heat/battery drain, but not a lot.

Did you use time machine to recover your data?

 

[kdhoe]

Did you use time machine to recover your data?

No, full reinstall.

 

[Tony N.]

970 EVO would be similar to your 960 EVO.

Anandtech has numbers on SSD idle power consumption:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12349/the-intel-ssd-760p-512gb-review/8

According to the chart, an idle 960 EVO consumes: 1196mA * 3.3V = 3.9W
Your best option would be 760p, which consumes: 666mA * 3.3V = 2.2W

Looks like your current battery capacity is about 4h * 20W = 80Wh
So 760p should bring your battery life to about 80Wh / (20W - 3.9W + 2.2W) = 4.4h

Thanks for the reply. It turns out Spotlight indexing was causing my battery life to be 3.5 hours. With Spotlight turned off, I'm getting around 4.5-5 hours now. Which is still not what I was getting before. I'm going to try a Intel 660p to see if I could gain back some more battery life. The performance of the 960 EVO is really being wasted on my laptop since I'm only running PCIe 2.0 x4.

 

[Vaibhav S]

Would you have got something else given a choice and if need is of 1TB?

Thanks for the reply. It turns out Spotlight indexing was causing my battery life to be 3.5 hours. With Spotlight turned off, I'm getting around 4.5-5 hours now. Which is still not what I was getting before. I'm going to try a Intel 660p to see if I could gain back some more battery life. The performance of the 960 EVO is really being wasted on my laptop since I'm only running PCIe 2.0 x4.

 

[Tony N.]

I have the same machine (15" MBP mid-2015), installed 760p 1TB, with the system information showing "x4 and 8.0 GT/s for the connection", however the disk speedtest is only showing 1500/1500 r/w speed which is only the speed of "x4 and 5.0GT/s", have I done anything wrong? If I had, what can I do to get the r/w speed up to your machines?

View attachment 773721
View attachment 773722​

Do you mind downloading istatmenu and showing us your idle power amperage on the Intel 760p?

Shown in the picture here at the bottom of the page. I just want to see how it compares to the Samsung 860 EVO. Thank you!

 

[dobow]

I've been running my 970 Evo for the last month or so and it's worked without any unexpected crashes. I'm on a late 2013 so it doesn't hibernate, and I've not patched it. However, the issue I do have is like some people recently have been saying that I seem to be using more power than I was before. What's the best software to log what is eating my battery?

I did a clean wipe and re-install when I did this. If I watch Activity Monitor no software seems particularly high. I enabled disk encryption which I hadn't before. Should that have increased usage?

 

[Tony N.]

Download istatmenu. You could see from my post above yours that I attached a picture and on the bottom there is the SSD's amperage usage.

I would like to see your readings. Here's my 960 EVO 1TB which NEVER draws below .36A. This is too power hungry for me. I will be looking for alternatives. I have the new Intel 660p QLC ssd coming in this week. Hopefully it's more power efficient than these Samsung drives.
[doublepost=1534145979][/doublepost]

hi guys. just to share my experience with 970 evo and sintech long black adapter. I have a rmbp 15" 2015.
so far the 970 evo is the best aftermarket ssd for my Mac in my opinion.
I tried in the past kc1000 and 960 evo and 960 pro.
first, the 970 evo reaches top performance, as picture.
second: battery lifetime, is great. not as long as the apple original ssd, but not bad as 960evo-pro.
very happy with it

ps I'm not using sudo pmset standby 0

Hi,

Could you post the SSD's amperage stats from istatmenu? It's in the sensor info.

 

[dobow]

Download istatmenu. You could see from my post above yours that I attached a picture and on the bottom there is the SSD's amperage usage.

I would like to see your readings. Here's my 960 EVO 1TB which NEVER draws below .36A. This is too power hungry for me. I will be looking for alternatives. I have the new Intel 660p QLC ssd coming in this week. Hopefully it's more power efficient than these Samsung drives.
[doublepost=1534145979][/doublepost]

Hi,

Could you post the SSD's amperage stats from istatmenu? It's in the sensor info.

2013 rMBP 2.4GHz 8GB

This is with a lightweight load. Safari with a couple of tabs, Airmail + SpamSieve, iTunes, Bluetooth headphones and Anki (flashcard software). Doing that with brightness set at level 6 (so under half) says I'm using 12-5W which seems high and with 91% battery gives me an estimate of around 5 hours. Battery capacity is at 93% so it's not like that's worn out too much.

As far as the SSD, it seems bizarrely high and constantly spiking up to 0.75A, mainly sitting at 0.52A.

Are these numbers higher than they should be? If so, what can I do?

 

[terraphantm]

Download istatmenu. You could see from my post above yours that I attached a picture and on the bottom there is the SSD's amperage usage.

I would like to see your readings. Here's my 960 EVO 1TB which NEVER draws below .36A. This is too power hungry for me. I will be looking for alternatives. I have the new Intel 660p QLC ssd coming in this week. Hopefully it's more power efficient than these Samsung drives.
[doublepost=1534145979][/doublepost]

Hi,

Could you post the SSD's amperage stats from istatmenu? It's in the sensor info.

Here's my HP EX920 1TB.

 

[weckart]

Are these numbers higher than they should be? If so, what can I do?

Looks a little high. Might just be a power hungry drive. I once returned a Kingston V200 SATA drive that ran 65ºC at idle.

Here's mine on a 2015 MBP 13" with an SX8200 480GB drive running Mojave PB5.



Idles at 0.18A and temps hover around 25ºC-26ºC with the occasional spike into the 0.4A territory when writing largish files. Battery life marginally lower than with the stock drive but the battery life indicator seems more consistent and credible. With the stock drive, the indicator would occasionally show 14-20hours of life left.

 

[dobow]

Looks a little high. Might just be a power hungry drive. I once returned a Kingston V200 SATA drive that ran 65ºC at idle.

Here's mine on a 2015 MBP 13" with an SX8200 480GB drive running Mojave PB5.

View attachment 775685

Idles at 0.18A and temps hover around 25ºC-26ºC with the occasional spike into the 0.4A territory when writing largish files. Battery life marginally lower than with the stock drive but the battery life indicator seems more consistent and credible. With the stock drive, the indicator would occasionally show 14-20hours of life left.

Tempting to send it back as I've got a few days.

What are your Black Magic results? And how does the SSD spike when that's on? Here I get about 1000-1200 read + write which spikes it up to 1.33A. Anything you don't like about the SX8200?

 

[weckart]

MBP 13" is only PCIe 2.0 so it maxes out at 1500 read and 1350 write. Power draw spikes to around 1.2A during BlackMagic per the graph although the drop down menu indicated 1.30A. So far I am pleased with the drive. Seems frugal with the battery and none of the drawbacks of QLC drives, whilst not costing much more. Longevity is the only thing that remains to be seen.

 

[davibe]

hi guys. just to share my experience with 970 evo and sintech long black adapter. I have a rmbp 15" 2015.
so far the 970 evo is the best aftermarket ssd for my Mac in my opinion.
I tried in the past kc1000 and 960 evo and 960 pro.
first, the 970 evo reaches top performance, as picture.
second: battery lifetime, is great. not as long as the apple original ssd, but not bad as 960evo-pro.
very happy with it

ps I'm not using sudo pmset standby 0

xelanaiznac Many people are complainig about battery life with 970. I don't understand wether it's because they have a pre-2015 model, or maybe because they are using windows. I am used to the 8 hours of battery life i get with the original ssd. Can you estimate how much battery life you have lost since the upgrade ? I'd like to buy the 2tb 970 but battery life matters a lot to me (i work a lot while traveling/commuting)

 

[dobow]

xelanaiznac Many people are complainig about battery life with 970. I don't understand wether it's because they have a pre-2015 model, or maybe because they are using windows. I am used to the 8 hours of battery life i get with the original ssd. Can you estimate how much battery life you have lost since the upgrade ? I'd like to buy the 2tb 970 but battery life matters a lot to me (i work a lot while traveling/commuting)

Not using Windows here.

 

[liudayu]

Do you mind downloading istatmenu and showing us your idle power amperage on the Intel 760p?

Shown in the picture here at the bottom of the page. I just want to see how it compares to the Samsung 860 EVO. Thank you!

 

[H.H]

xelanaiznac Many people are complainig about battery life with 970. I don't understand wether it's because they have a pre-2015 model, or maybe because they are using windows. I am used to the 8 hours of battery life i get with the original ssd. Can you estimate how much battery life you have lost since the upgrade ? I'd like to buy the 2tb 970 but battery life matters a lot to me (i work a lot while traveling/commuting)

I had 970 EVO 1TB for a few days. Battery life went from ~10 hours to ~6 hours with
mostly just email and reading online articles. This is on a 2015 MBP 13 inch. No Windows.

I also tried a SX8200 960GB this weekend. It's definitely better than 970 EVO, but still
worse than Apple SSD. I'm getting ~8hrs, i.e. about 2 hours shorter than Apple SSD.

I think the difference is because Apple only does aggressive power saving w/ Apple SSDs.
I compared output from pmset -g rawlog. It seems with Apple SSD, the overall battery
drain routinely goes down to ~400mA or less when the system is idle, whereas with
SX8200, it hovers around ~600mA with an idle system. So overall the power impact
from SX8200 is around 200mA, which seems to match what's reported by istat
menus (0.19A).

 

[AbdallahRizk]

I've already tried to install win10 bootcamp on my MBPr mid-2014 + Samsung 960evo with sintech long black adapter.
Unfortunately when reaching near the end of installation, it happened that error pop-up showed and I couldn't continue to finish installing it anymore.

So, I made the image file of my WTG(USB-SSD) with 'winclone 6', but it couldn't succeed, either.
My macbook wasn't able to boot win10. (BSOD problem)
I assume that my WTG had no Samsung specified nvme driver and it could result in failure.
Finally, I set up Samsung nvme windows driver on my WTG and then I re-made the winclone image file, I got the successful outcome.

If you reproduced this situation, it could be the driver's problem, I think.
Please tell me if I'm wrong.

Hi, thanks for sharing I'm trying to figure out the problem since two months, could you please explain how cause I have 960 evo with Sintech but I keep facing BSOD problems. I did install windows 10 on the default mac ssd and I used winclone to take an image but once I try to restore the image it restored succesfully but once I boot using windows I got the same BSOD problems. so what do you mean by setting windows driver with WTG (I dont know what WTG stand for). Thank You

 

[weckart]

I think the difference is because Apple only does aggressive power saving w/ Apple SSDs.
I compared output from pmset -g rawlog. It seems with Apple SSD, the overall battery
drain routinely goes down to ~400mA or less when the system is idle, whereas with
SX8200, it hovers around ~600mA with an idle system. So overall the power impact
from SX8200 is around 200mA, which seems to match what's reported by istat
menus (0.19A).

From what I have seen on Anandtech, that is about as good as it gets with the current crop of NVMe drives. Probably the only way to improve it is to somehow dump the Apple firmware and see whether it can be applied to third party drives assuming no serious hardware discrepancies. One thing I did notice after installing my drive was that TRIM was automatically enabled.

 

[tshelby73]

Looking for the SPI to J1600 adapter. Are these normally around 55.00 usd or does anyone know cheaper options.

 

[ohnggni]

Hi, thanks for sharing I'm trying to figure out the problem since two months, could you please explain how cause I have 960 evo with Sintech but I keep facing BSOD problems. I did install windows 10 on the default mac ssd and I used winclone to take an image but once I try to restore the image it restored succesfully but once I boot using windows I got the same BSOD problems. so what do you mean by setting windows driver with WTG (I dont know what WTG stand for). Thank You

The BSOD problem I faced was completely solved.
Please see the post, #1685

 

[Tony N.]

Hi Guys,

I was sick and tired of 3.5 hours battery life with the 960 EVO 1TB. I bought the new Intel 660p QLC SSD 512GB (for now, waiting for 1TB to be release) for $100. It's running so much better! I'm getting 7+ hours again! I haven't tested too much but I would say if I were to surf and do light task I should get somewhere around 6 to be honest. I just got it so further testing to be done.

Here are some brief specs:
MBP 15" mid-2014 (PCIe 2.0)
Speed: 900 write/1500 read
Power consumption: 0.17A idle/0.80A active
TRIM: On

Brand new High Sierra install, the system idles at 11-12w draw. This is according to istatmenu. My battery has like 30-40 cycles on it. It's new.

Let me know if you guys have any questions!

8/15/18 Update:

I wanted to post this to make sure that I'm fair to Samsung in my review. I recently found out that the reason I was getting 3.5 hours on the Samsung was because I had two apps that was preventing my laptop from switching to integrated graphics. It was solely using Nvidia gfx which is a huge power draw. The apps responsible was Menubus and Screenconnect. For some reason these two apps kept the Nvidia graphics card on 24/7 while on battery.

Without these two apps preventing the laptop from switching to Iris Pro gfx, I'm now getting more like 5-6 hours of battery life on light use. This still not as good as the Intel 660p but it's not stupid bad like 3.5 hours. The laptop is much cooler while running on the Iris Pro as well.

I would say with the Samsung you're losing somewhere around 30-60 mins of battery time. Which is not bad if you're on a mid-2015 MBP 15" since you're able to take advantage of the speed performance. For those of us on PCIe 2.0 x4 it's not worth the extra juice drain for the performance. The Intel drive will almost max us out.

The 960 EVO idles at around 0.40A average (you could see from the picture below it spikes up and down between 0.36A and 0.53A while it's idling and spikes up to 1.0A-1.4A during full use (running Blackmagic disk test).

Before my entire laptop was idling at 23-24w average, after shutting down those two apps to allow Iris Pro gfx to switch, it's now idling at around 14-15w average. I pretty much gain 3 hours of battery life from this simple fix alone.

I'm quite happy with the Intel 660p so far and I'm probably gonna end up returning the 960 EVO.

BIG FYI - I'm also running Volta to undervolt the CPU by 80mV. This probably gain about 20-30 mins of battery.

I hope this helps someone out there. Cheers.

System draw @ idle w/ 960 EVO

960 EVO idle and full use

Some more 960 EVO info

 

[PLBossman]

Hello guys, i am wondering is it possible to put other SSD like 960 Pro or any other like Intel mentioned above in Macbook Pro 2013 Early ?, i see all over internet info that i could do that in Early 2013 so i am wondering if it would be possible in Early since i have high sierra.

 

[dobow]

One thing that I don't understand is why would the 970Evo hit battery life so much? P=IV right so current = 1.3A *3.3V is only 4.3W at full draw. Is it triggering something else?