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Late 2013 rMBP SSD upgrade speeds!

serialtoon

serialtoon

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 1, 2009
648
145
1 of 8 bits
So my wife was using a late 2013 rMBP with a paltry 128GB ssd. I decided that i would upgrade her to an iMac since she rarley takes the laptop out of the house ever since finishing college. I personally own a mid 2015 rMBP 15" with a 256GB ssd. Well fast forward to a lazy Friday night as i was prepping her 13" macbook for sale. I ended up thinking to myself..."I wonder if the pci-e SSD is replaceable?" Lo and behold it is! So then i had the clever idea to pull MY ssd from my 15" rMBP and place it in the 13" in hopes that it would work, why wouldnt it right?

So long story short, it works, and its quite a bit faster than it was. The 128gb ssd was running at x2 link speed where the 256gb ssd from the 15" rMBP is running at x4 link speed which means that i went from a 300-450~ read/write to a whopping 1200-1500~ read/write speed.

Time to look for an Apple used 256gb current gen ssd to replace in the 13" rMBP...
 
The used 256 GB SSD replacements are quite expensive, I think it would be cheaper overall to sell the laptop and buy one with a higher storage depending on how much you get for the laptop.
 
RoboWarriorSr said:
The used 256 GB SSD replacements are quite expensive, I think it would be cheaper overall to sell the laptop and buy one with a higher storage depending on how much you get for the laptop.
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You are right, ive been looking around and they are expensive compared to OWC. I dont like that the OWC Aura is slower than "stock" speeds though. Also given that it seems like no one else is manufacturing these specific drives keeps the pricing high and the performance low. Still kind of cool though.
 
serialtoon said:
You are right, ive been looking around and they are expensive compared to OWC. I dont like that the OWC Aura is slower than "stock" speeds though. Also given that it seems like no one else is manufacturing these specific drives keeps the pricing high and the performance low. Still kind of cool though.
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I'm hoping in a few years, OWC will have at least increased the SSD speeds to around 1 GB/s and prices have dropped before upgrading my SSD.
 
Check out the snippet!
 

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The new ones use 4 lane PCIe and the old ones use 2 lane PCIe, this is the reason for the speed increase, simple as that.
 
Samuelsan2001 said:
The new ones use 4 lane PCIe and the old ones use 2 lane PCIe, this is the reason for the speed increase, simple as that.
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Well when i comes to laptops (macs mostly) im not too keen on what Apple does to their boards but i was always under the impression that the pcie bus was running at x2 speeds (at the connector) not the pcie device connecting to it much like sata is. So when i saw that it was running at x4 speeds i was quite impressed with the difference. Thanks!
 
serialtoon said:
Completley worth it considering the speeds. This thing feels like new again (maybe cause i wiped it clean too....) 10/10, would do again.
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So glad to hear this is possible - I've been searching for a while online and seen very conflicting reports about whether it is actually possible to fit a 2015 rMBP SSD to a late 2013 model. Do you think that even though it works it could actually cause issues e.g. the 2013 model doens't have the correct cooling to support an SSD with these speeds?
 
nebsta said:
So glad to hear this is possible - I've been searching for a while online and seen very conflicting reports about whether it is actually possible to fit a 2015 rMBP SSD to a late 2013 model. Do you think that even though it works it could actually cause issues e.g. the 2013 model doens't have the correct cooling to support an SSD with these speeds?
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No it's will be absolutely fine.
 
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