Anyone who's investigated this knows the deal... the Apple proprietary connector, the differing standards, and OWC being the only supplier of 3rd-party upgrades. That last part may be changing though, thanks to a few adapter cards coming out of China. There is a long thread on macrumors dealing with this but it can get overwhelming. Based on my own research, it seems there's a chance this drive might work to upgrade my 256GB to 512GB:

XPG SX7000 PCIE NVME GEN3X4 M.2 512GB SSD

Of course, what's attracting me is the price. $150 for a 512GB NVMe drive is the lowest I've seen. As I understand it, my Late 2013 15" rMBP is a PCIe x2 AHCI but will do NVMe if I'm running High Sierra. Also, as I understand it, it will support a four-channel PCIe connection.

I've looked at the drive's pin configuration and it seems to match this Sintech adapter. I know there may be other variables at play here and I don't particularly feel like blowing $150. On the macrumors thread there is talk of sleep issues (possibly curable by changing the hibernate mode setting). The page for the Sintech adapter lists some very specific drives as compatible, and this list does not include this XPG model. So maybe there is some weird-ass firmware somewhere on the SSD or something in OSX that's looking for a parameter or setting that's unique to certain drives; this is the stuff that's above my pay grade, but I'm hoping there's someone here with more knowledge than me about this stuff. Thanks in advance for any words of advice – if this drive works, all of us with these earlier MBPs might want to grab one of them while this deal lasts (note it says "one per order")!



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 03/21/2018 10:47AM by reezekeys.

Maybe contact Adata?

Thanks for the suggestion but I seriously doubt they will know the answer or want to even guess, since this is a hack that a very small percentage of people in the market for these drives are doing. I posted on the macrumors thread but nobody responded there, at least not yet.

Considering the fact that the OWC option is double the price and smaller capacity ($330 / 480GB), I figured someone here would be as interested as I in knowing if this deal will work. Maybe not.

[on edit: Looking again, that Rakuten page has a link to contact Adata, so since they made it easy I took your advice! I'm not expecting a definitive answer but hope springs eternal!]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/21/2018 06:15PM by reezekeys.

I dunno. I recall being burned by off-brand (not speaking of OWC with established products, I mean dubious China sources), supposedly apple-compatible ram back in the day when my 2400c took a very specific ram chip. I'd let others be the testers for this one.

Doing more digging in that 40+ page thread... looks like Apple has code somewhere that only accepts certain drives. I'm not sure if High Sierra changes that, still investigating. And the drives themselves have firmware on them that may need to be rejiggered to work with our computers. Like I said, above my pay grade. One thing I know - it ain't like the old days when I put a 500GB spinning platter drive in my previous MacBook Pro - for $70!