MacBook Pro 2015 SSD upgrade

[macrage]

Of all the posts I have been reading few have taken the plunge to try to upgrade the SSD in the 2015 MacBook Pro and none to a NVMe PCIe drive. Of the older posts, it mentions that Apple did not support NVMe yet however with newer versions of macOS this got me wondering. Now that Apple support NVMe and now that NVMexpress is listed in the hardware details of the macOS info, could I get an NVMe drive to be visible or even boot.

I have a spare 128GB NVMe SSD laying about and decided to get a sintech m.2 to apples rubbish pcie adapter. Now before plugging it in I booted the macOS Sierra installer from USB to check the hardware. When I do "ioreg | grep -i nvme" I can clearly see nothing listed since the original drive is AHCI PCIe. I shutdown, open up the machine, install the NVMe + m.2 adapter SSD and boot the installer over USB again.

Doing the same command "ioreg | grep -i nvme" now shows a NVMe device listed so clearly the operating system installer can see the NVMe drive. However, I am still unable to see it in diskutil gui or with hdiutil. Would I just be able to just hack a driver in to get it to work or will Apple actively prevent a non-apple NVMe device from being used. (e.g firmware lockout?)

If there is anything else I could try to get diskutil to see the drive I would be willing to try again. Anyone got any ideas?

 

[MichaelDT]

The hackintosh community has a kernel extension that may do the trick. Search google for NVMe and OSX86.

 

[tubeexperience]

2015 MacBook Pro don't support NVMe. You need an SSD with AHCI.

 

[MichaelDT]

2015 MacBook Pro don't support NVMe. You need an SSD with AHCI.

True, but it may just be lack of drivers. If the device enumerates and is recognized, then it may not be a hardware incompatibility but software. Which would be solved with the proper kernel extension or writing one. I am aware that the hackintosh community has worked on this and has a solution. The largest hurdle on a macbook would be EFI because it would need to recognize the drive to start the system contained within.