External enclosure or adapter for late 2013 ssd??

[braxton34]

My neighbor brought me her late 2013 MBP 13" that got wet and will no longer power on. She has a lot of important info on the hard drive that wasn't backed up. I suspect the hard drive is OK, but how the heck does one read that tiny Samsung 256GB SSD once it is pulled from the macbook pro?

I can't seem to find any external adapters or enclosures that I can plug the SSD into to so I can read the data on it from my PC computer.

Can anyone help me out??
TIA

 

[T5BRICK]

Apple uses a non-standard connector on the late 2013 and newer rMBPs. I don't know if an adapter exists.

 

[braxton34]

Not what I wanted to hear! there must be a way to get the data off the hard drive some how???

 

[JTToft]

If you can, borrow a rMBP and put the SSD in there to read off it.

Also, tell your neighbour to start keeping backups.

 

[RKO]

Is this link any help?

 

[yjchua95]

Is this link any help?

It's from some Chinese website, so I wouldn't bet on it.

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Not what I wanted to hear! there must be a way to get the data off the hard drive some how???

You'll have to stick it into another Mac that uses a PCIe SSD, which are basically Haswell and later Macs.

 

[braxton34]

Would they then boot from this foreign hard drive? I think I might need an identical model so the hardware matches not?

 

[Intell]

If you put it into another late-2013 or later Mac with a SSD slot, it'll boot as long as the version of Mac OS X on the SSD is the same as or higher than the version the working Mac originally shipped with.

 

[braxton34]

Is this link any help?

Thanks for the link!

$99 is a bit pricey for something that may or may not work. I might try to track down a rMBP late 2013 to try a HD swap.

Why does Apple always have to make simple things (remove a HD and back up it's data) so difficult...

 

[JTToft]

Why does Apple always have to make simple things (remove a HD and back up it's data) so difficult...

- Backups really are intended to be performed before accidents happen...

 

[yjchua95]

Why does Apple always have to make simple things (remove a HD and back up it's data) so difficult...

What, are you implying that it's Apple's fault? If a user has to remove a drive to back it up, it's the user's fault for not backing it up before things go south. Backups should be done on a regular basis (hell, I perform Time Machine backups daily). There's a reason why it's called a backup.

 

[braxton34]

What, are you implying that it's Apple's fault? If a user has to remove a drive to back it up, it's the user's fault for not backing it up before things go south. Backups should be done on a regular basis (hell, I perform Time Machine backups daily). There's a reason why it's called a backup.

If you read the thread you would see it was a neighbor, not me, that failed to back up the data. Nevertheless, I will personally never buy a newer macbook pro knowing that the SSD is now proprietary.

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- Backups really are intended to be performed before accidents happen...

True, but on every other laptop on the planet, you still have the option to back up data from the internal HD even if the laptop is completely dead

 

[laurihoefs]

True, but on every other laptop on the planet, you still have the option to back up data from the internal HD even if the laptop is completely dead

You would run into the same problem with some other newer laptops that use PCIe M.2 SSDs.

The non-standard form factor is not the issue. You can find plenty of adapters and enclosures for the older SATA versions of the SSD blades. And there are PCIe adapters for the current SSDs.

But there are no USB to PCIe bridges available, and most likely never will be. So to recover data from any PCIe SSD, be it M.2 or Apple proprietary, you need a PCIe adater and a desktop computer or a Thunderbolt/expressCad PCIe enclosure.

 

[yjchua95]

If you read the thread you would see it was a neighbor, not me, that failed to back up the data. Nevertheless, I will personally never buy a newer macbook pro knowing that the SSD is now proprietary.

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True, but on every other laptop on the planet, you still have the option to back up data from the internal HD even if the laptop is completely dead

Untrue. Newer (and also more expensive) laptops from other PC manufacturers (like the Asus G501) have PCIe M.2 SSDs, and there are practically no enclosures for these drives either, simply because nobody makes a PCIe-USB enclosure.

So let's say you have an Asus G501. You also can't just take out the SSD and stick it into an enclosure, because it uses a PCIe SSD (with an M.2 form factor).

 

[braxton34]

For those interested I found this OWC link for an external USB enclosure for the SSD drive in question.

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/MAU3ENPRPCI/