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

[user256]

@user256, Mojave needs to be installed to the original, internal Apple SSD in order to update the bootrom. I say this based on my own experience with my early 2015 13" Air.

Agreed. Cmd+Q's guide also states this as well. As I have no clue what version was installed on the original SSD, I'm taking a risk,

I'm sort of hopeful from this post, which mentions the same bootroom version I have, and appears to work for them.
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...ssd-to-m-2-nvme.2034976/page-15#post-25338070

Either way, I'm curious to find out if it will work.

 

[Angel NN]

I do have similar issues as many people in this thread do. Sleep itself works just fine with some battery drain of roughly 1% per hour, hibernation is a no-no though. After sleeping for a long time and entering hibernation, my MBA has to reboot on the next wakeup. I reproduced this behaviour by using hibernatemode 25 to force it to write the RAM to the drive with a specific time, it always fails right at that point. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of going for the short black adapter, I only found this thread when I already had ordered it from Sintech in China. Your might get better results with the long black adapter that got recommended on here many times.

That being said, the new JSER adapter is on its way to me. Actually, if you search this thread, some people report having no issue at all with sleep and hibernation on a 2013-2014 Mac with JSER adapters, some already on Mojve too (doesn't matter much though since Boot ROM is he same). You can find similar reports in the reviews on Amazon (at least on the German page). Package should arrive shortly so I will keep in touch.

But even then, it's only around 1% of battery per hour in sleep, nothing too dramatic considering the very noticeable increase in performance, even on an Air. Most important is that the OS itself is 100% stable and it reliably wakes up from sleep.

For now I'm happy but I will keep trying to get hibernation to work as soon as I get my new adapter. Please also share your results when you get your drive.

Will do, thank you for sharing this info.
I ordered my adapter directly from the sintech.cn website, hope to get it soon. I am also planing to change the thermal paste (Thermal Grizzly High Performance) at the same time, when changing the ssd. I think after 5 years of use, probably it is time to do it.
Some people report after updating the ssd to 970 evo, that there is overload on the CPU cores when doing some tasks. Do you have heat problems on the CPU cores at the moment?

 

[davidrj]

Will do, thank you for sharing this info.
I ordered my adapter directly from the sintech.cn website, hope to get it soon. I am also planing to change the thermal paste (Thermal Grizzly High Performance) at the same time, when changing the ssd. I think after 5 years of use, probably it is time to do it.
Some people report after updating the ssd to 970 evo, that there is overload on the CPU cores when doing some tasks. Do you have heat problems on the CPU cores at the moment?

I don't have heat issues, but I also changed my CPU thermal paste a few months ago. It is a little bit warmer than with the stock SSD. The back cover of the MB gets warm so I guess all the internal heat up a bit, but it's not running too hot or anything. Some people even use heat sinks on their drives, so that might also be an option.

CPU load itself is unchanged. Time Machine backup and disk speed tests cause the usual load, but since the drive itself is faster, the times under load are shorter. I have the 960 Evo though, not the newer 970 Evo. YMMV.

 

[Audit13]

Agreed. Cmd+Q's guide also states this as well. As I have no clue what version was installed on the original SSD, I'm taking a risk,

I'm sort of hopeful from this post, which mentions the same bootroom version I have, and appears to work for them.
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...ssd-to-m-2-nvme.2034976/page-15#post-25338070

Either way, I'm curious to find out if it will work.

Please report back when you have a moment.

I have a late 2013 13" Pro that may need an new SSD too.

Thanks.

 

[Angel NN]

I don't have heat issues, but I also changed my CPU thermal paste a few months ago. It is a little bit warmer than with the stock SSD. The back cover of the MB gets warm so I guess all the internal heat up a bit, but it's not running too hot or anything. Some people even use heat sinks on their drives, so that might also be an option.

CPU load itself is unchanged. Time Machine backup and disk speed tests cause the usual load, but since the drive itself is faster, the times under load are shorter. I have the 960 Pro though, not the newer 970 Evo. YMMV.

Have you tested the speed? I just watched video regarding the speed on mack book pro 2015 that can't achieve the full potential of the ssd because the mother board doesn't support it. Here is the link:

You can download the app to measure the speed from here : http://www.katsurashareware.com/pgs/adm.html
I guess the top speed we should expect will be 1600/1600 read and write, which is a bit disappointing but still ok. My stock Apple ssd does 823/751 read/write, so samsung doubles that speed.

 

[davidrj]

I guess the top speed we should expect will be 1600/1600 read and write, which is a bit disappointing but still ok. My stock Apple ssd does 823/751 read/write, so samsung doubles that speed.

I attached a photo of my results. Maybe your drive gets marginally better results since it's newer but the biggest bottleneck is that my motherboard only runs PCIe 2.0. Even with 4 lanes, around 1,6GB/s is the maximum you can get. But don't focus too much on peak read/write. For daily use, metrics like random/4K IO are much more noticeable. I don't have any benchmark from before to compare, but my MBA is significantly faster in daily use.

I think only from MBP 2015 on you'd get PCIe 3.0 with the full 25Gbps. In that case, handling large files would of course be twice as fast, but I don't think you'd see the same performance increase in mixed IO (i.e. regular use, boot and app speed).

 

[Angel NN]

I attached a photo of my results. Maybe your drive gets marginally better results since it's newer but the biggest bottleneck is that my motherboard only runs PCIe 2.0. Even with 4 lanes, around 1,6GB/s is the maximum you can get. But don't focus too much on peak read/write. For daily use, metrics like random/4K IO are much more noticeable. I don't have any benchmark from before to compare, but my MBA is significantly faster in daily use.

I think only from MBP 2015 on you'd get PCIe 3.0 with the full 25Gbps. In that case, handling large files would of course be twice as fast, but I don't think you'd see the same performance increase in mixed IO (i.e. regular use, boot and app speed).

It is what it is, but if i knew earlier that i won't get the same speed, probably won't be bothering buying the latest ssd and using adapters and solving issues and would probably go for this fully compatible one: https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc/macbook-pro-retina-display/2013-2014-2015

For now, will leave this OWC Aurora Pro X as a second option. Will see after the upgrade is there any issues and if ok will stay with the 970 evo, if too many issues will sell it and go for the second option. Will post again when the update is finished (hope to receive everything soon enough).
Best Regards

 

[davidrj]

It is what it is, but if i knew earlier that i won't get the same speed, probably won't be bothering buying the latest ssd and using adapters and solving issues and would probably go for this fully compatible one: https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc/macbook-pro-retina-display/2013-2014-2015

For now, will leave this OWC Aurora Pro X as a second option. Will see after the upgrade is there any issues and if ok will stay with the 970 evo, if too many issues will sell it and go for the second option. Will post again when the update is finished (hope to receive everything soon enough).
Best Regards

If you don't want to fiddle around with adapters and just need more storage, of course OWC is a safe choice.

That being said, consider post #1926 from @ilovejamon . He is running a 2014 Macbook with a JSER Adapter and ADATA SX8200 and he has no issues whatsoever with sleep it seems.

I got curious and ordered it right now, it will arrive on Monday so I will report back then. Keep in mind that with an OWC Aurora Pro X, you won't even hit 1600MB/s. And the SX8200 is significantly cheaper. So you might want to wait a bit with your order, maybe other people with SX8200 (or Intel 760p - same controller afaik?) on 2013-2014 Machines could chime in if they have any issues?

 

[IdentityCrisis]

I just bought the NGFF M.2 PCIe SSD Card as 2013 2014 2015 MacBook SSD (ST-NGFF2013-C) =
$13.99 and the ADATA XPG SX8200 480GB 3D NAND NVMe Gen3x4 M.2 2280 Solid State Drive (ASX8200NP-480GT-C) for $109 on Amazon. So I am getting a lot more than OWC for over half the cost less.

Hope it works on my 2015 MBP 13" Retina.

 

[rexoserox]

Just found out that the Paragon NTFS causes NVMe panics.
Had it 3 times in the last couple of days. The paragon kext always shows up in the error message.

If you have Paragon NTFS installed and still get some NVMe panics even with the right pmset then try uninstall the paragon ntfs kext and see if it works

 

[ravic]

I just bought the NGFF M.2 PCIe SSD Card as 2013 2014 2015 MacBook SSD (ST-NGFF2013-C) =
$13.99 and the ADATA XPG SX8200 480GB 3D NAND NVMe Gen3x4 M.2 2280 Solid State Drive (ASX8200NP-480GT-C) for $109 on Amazon. So I am getting a lot more than OWC for over half the cost less.

Hope it works on my 2015 MBP 13" Retina.

I have the same MacBook and it will work well for you. I have a Samsung pm961 512GB, thinking of switching to Adata sx8200 to get rid of the sleep issues.

Make sure you upgrade to Mojave before you install the disk. That way your bootrom will be up to date.

 

[IdentityCrisis]

I have the same MacBook and it will work well for you. I have a Samsung pm961 512GB, thinking of switching to Adata sx8200 to get rid of the sleep issues.

Make sure you upgrade to Mojave before you install the disk. That way your bootrom will be up to date.

Awesome to hear. Can't wait to try!

 

[Kvonos]

Hi,

I've been reading for a while now and I'll admit I'm kinda lost.

I have a mid2014 15"; a few weeks ago the stock samsung 250gb, died. I removed the ssd and plugged an external one with his own station, via usb. Managed to install OS through cmq+shift+r, but decided to stop at OS X 10.9.5 (13F1911) for some reason.

At this point I can't upgrade to High Sierra or Mojave because it says I'm missing a firmware. I want to upgrade it anyway with a Samsung 970 PRO 512GB + Sintech NGFF M.2 nVME . I still have to order them both: will they work?

I also created HighSierra installation on my thumb drive 16GB using DiskMaker, but how do I get through the firmware problem?

Thanks a lot.


***

Model Identifier - MacBookPro11,2
Model A1398
sn - C02N4E88G3QC
2,2 Ghz i7 16GB DD3

 

[whg]

I have been reading this thread for some time. As I own a MacBook Pro 15" (Mid 2015, no dGPU) that I mainly used as backup until today, I decided to give it some more usability by upgrading the SSD. From this thread, I believe the favoured way to achieve this is with the long black Sintech NGFF M.2 PCIe 2280 SSD-Card adapter. I also got an Intel 760p series 2TB SSD because this uses much less power than most other choices.

My upgrade steps (as recommended elsewhere in this thread):
1) Make a bootable USB stick with a Mojave installer (I already had Mojave on the Macbook)
2) Make a full (bootable) backup with Carbon Copy Cloner to an external HD
3) Replace the original Apple SSD with Sintech-Intel 760p combo
4) Boot from USB, initialise the new SSD with Disk Utility, then install Mojave
5) Boot from external HDD with Carbon Copy Cloner
6) Restore full system with Carbon Copy Cloner

At the end of step 6) I was notified of some read errors in 3 App containers. I deleted the affected Apps and reinstalled these. The read errors seem to be an issue with the old external HDD used.

At first I noticed some higher temperatures (compared to before before upgrade), probably caused by re-indexing the new SSD. After about 1 hour everything is back to normal.

So far everything works as I hoped it would. With the Mid 2015 model I don't expect any sleep issues, but will keep you posted in case some problems should show up (tomorrow?).

I was ready to buy a new 2018 MBP with 2TB SSD, but was reluctant to do so after all the issues the new version seems to suffer from. If the upgrade of my Mid 2015 works well, I will have saved a lot of money.

 

[Audit13]

@whg, I recommend installing Mojave with the original Apple SSD in the MacBook before installing the nvme drive. This will ensure the MacBook is running the latest bootrom.

 

[Angel NN]

If you don't want to fiddle around with adapters and just need more storage, of course OWC is a safe choice.

That being said, consider post #1926 from @ilovejamon . He is running a 2014 Macbook with a JSER Adapter and ADATA SX8200 and he has no issues whatsoever with sleep it seems.

I got curious and ordered it right now, it will arrive on Monday so I will report back then. Keep in mind that with an OWC Aurora Pro X, you won't even hit 1600MB/s. And the SX8200 is significantly cheaper. So you might want to wait a bit with your order, maybe other people with SX8200 (or Intel 760p - same controller afaik?) on 2013-2014 Machines could chime in if they have any issues?

Thanks for the hint. Yes, it looks much better deal than the OWC, look here:

.
The only concern is that in the comments bellow the video, many people report that after 3 months of use the ADATA ssd's just die. May be this is not the case with this particular model, but who knows. Any way I am curious what results you will get when you have it.

 

[Dacaba]

hi, I just mounted an Intel 760p on a MacBook Pro 15 mid 2015 with A-tech adapter I have a write speed 1355 and reading 1400. I think the reading speed should be better. can help Me

 

[whg]

@whg, I recommend installing Mojave with the original Apple SSD in the MacBook before installing the nvme drive. This will ensure the MacBook is running the latest bootrom.

Sure, that's what I did (and mentioned in my post, i.e. that I already had Mojave installed).

One thing I noted has probably nothing to do with the new SSD: The Carbon Copy Cloner restore introduced some glitches, such as missing App icons, doubled Launch App entries (in "open with" context menu) and probably other small things I didn't notice. All seems good again after I booted into Safe mode (holding shift during restart), which forces the rebuild of some system caches.

 

[Ryker9]

Hi, just tried to upgrade using ADATA XPG SX8200 480GB + JSER Adapter on rMBP 13' Mid-2014.
(deep) sleep worked twice, but never worked again, I also have the boot delay (10-15s). I'm thinking of flashing bootROM.

So:
- sleep issue.
- boot delay.

I also tried to reproduce the problem using hibernatemode 25, and each times it crashed. Logs :

UUID: Unknown UUID
2018-10-08 15:08:47 +0200 Failure                 Sleep Failure [code:0x11105000000001F]:                                               
Sleep/Wakes since boot at 2018-10-08 15:02:20 +0200 :0   Dark Wake Count in this sleep cycle:1

So I've seen some people not experiencing problems with sleep using the same adapter/ssd as mine, but they probably don't use deep sleep.

 

[Trunkz]

Hi, just tried to upgrade using ADATA XPG SX8200 480GB + JSER Adapter on rMBP 13' Mid-2014.
(deep) sleep worked twice, but never worked again, I also have the boot delay (10-15s). I'm thinking of flashing bootROM.

So:
- sleep issue.
- boot delay.

I also tried to reproduce the problem using hibernatemode 25, and each times it crashed. Logs :

UUID: Unknown UUID
2018-10-08 15:08:47 +0200 Failure                 Sleep Failure [code:0x11105000000001F]:                                              
Sleep/Wakes since boot at 2018-10-08 15:02:20 +0200 :0   Dark Wake Count in this sleep cycle:1

So I've seen some people not experiencing problems with sleep using the same adapter/ssd as mine, but they probably don't use deep sleep.

Hibernate does not work on pre-2015 MacBook Pro's and NVMe drives. Set to 0 as a workaround

 

[user256]

Sintech Adapter on the way
2018-10-06 08:50:31 left Shenzhen going to Vancouver
2018-10-06 08:50:31 left Shenzhen going to Shenzhen EMS Corp 中快(Hong Kong )Dept.

Leaning towards Intel 760p or ADATA XPG SX8200.

 

[m23l]

as I mentioned earlier I updated my rMBP 15 late '13 with Adata SX8200 480GB (Sintech adapter long rev. C) and I had no issue with hibernation (didn't need to change any settings even after a day there was no wake issues and no crashes) but what I seems to have problem with is that macbook is going always to 0% when on battery and will not automatically sleep on low battery e.g. 5% but instead it will shut off without saving any data (the message informing that battery is low and computer will go to sleep if not AC connected will be present though but never the less not sleeping automatically)

So my question - is this also one of the known problems with NVMe drivers on 2013-2015 or that is something else? Do you suggestion some fix for this? thank you

 

[Trunkz]

as I mentioned earlier I updated my rMBP 15 late '13 with Adata SX8200 480GB (Sintech adapter long rev. C) and I had no issue with hibernation (didn't need to change any settings even after a day there was no wake issues and no crashes) but what I seems to have problem with is that macbook is going always to 0% when on battery and will not automatically sleep on low battery e.g. 5% but instead it will shut off without saving any data (the message informing that battery is low and computer will go to sleep if not AC connected will be present though but never the less not sleeping automatically)

So my question - is this also one of the known problems with NVMe drivers on 2013-2015 or that is something else? Do you suggestion some fix for this? thank you

Can you post the results of a sudo pmset -g please.

 

[m23l]

Can you post the results of a sudo pmset -g please.

sudo pmset -g assertions:
Assertion status system-wide:
BackgroundTask 0
ApplePushServiceTask 0
UserIsActive 1
PreventUserIdleDisplaySleep 0
PreventSystemSleep 0
ExternalMedia 0
PreventUserIdleSystemSleep 0
NetworkClientActive 0
Listed by owning process:
pid 101(hidd): [0x0000002600098093] 00:00:00 UserIsActive named: "com.apple.iohideventsystem.queue.tickle.4294968190.3"
Timeout will fire in 120 secs Action=TimeoutActionRelease
No kernel assertions.
Idle sleep preventers: IODisplayWrangler

sudo pmset -g:
System-wide power settings:
Currently in use:
standbydelaylow 10800
standby 1
halfdim 1
hibernatefile /var/vm/sleepimage
gpuswitch 2
powernap 0
disksleep 10
standbydelayhigh 86400
sleep 1
autopoweroffdelay 28800
hibernatemode 3
autopoweroff 1
ttyskeepawake 1
displaysleep 2
highstandbythreshold 50
acwake 0
lidwake 1

 

[IdentityCrisis]

Whats the recommended procedure to replace the SSD on a MBP 2015 13" and keep all your data? Since they aren't regular 2.5 drives I can't easily hook them up to clone them.

I know you can do a internet recovery, but won't that install what came on the laptop and will that work with the NVME and Santech C adapter till I can get it upgraded again? Let me know as I am not familiar how I should go about this.