OWC Launches New Aura Pro X2 SSDs for Older MacBook Air and MacBook Pro Models

[Zdigital2015]

Absolutely! Please keep refurbing them - we'll keep buying them!

The “T” key on my Late 2016 15” MacBook Pro has begun making a distinctly different sound than the rest of my keyboard. I have followed Apple’s guidelines to clean it out...and now I wait. I prefer the reduced key travel of the Magic Keyboard, but, for me, there is just this sense of “offness” about the butterfly keyboard. I still have that sense of being not completely comfortable with it. As mushy as the Mid 2015 MacBook Pro keyboard is to me, along with one of the fans now sounding like it needs to be cleaned out or replaced and it not waking up from sleep correctly when connected to a secondary monitors via my Thunderbolt dock, I am loathe to let sell it. Hence, why I am so intrigued with the Aura X2 to replace the 256GB SSD in my Mid 2015 and I have no desire to pay for an SSDPOLARIS to the tune of $926.25 at beetstech.com, but I digress.

 

[macgeek01]

When a hibernate call is made, it resets sleep vs. causing a crash state. I will seek a more complete technical answer on Standby mode... but in all sleep circumstances, the system is maintained in a state for immediate wait. You will be in a reboot situation with improper shutdown if your battery goes dead while sleeping due to lack of hibernation capability, but other than that - no sleep related issue.

And with respect to the comment after - I would disagree that answers have been vague. I also apologize for my incorrect answers concerning Hibernation with pre-2015 systems which is not reflective of what 'OWC understands'. Further, how hibernation is handled is an Apple driver side issue at present and solvable by an update by Apple or with a new driver which we expect to release. Our team has an exceptional understanding of these aspects to say the least.

thank you.


[doublepost=1555609158][/doublepost]

and not only that - has a keyboard that is very much liked vs. what the new laptops have. I don't like the Touch Bar or the new keyboard and will be using my Retinas for years to come.

What ever happened to the bottom case attachment you were making for new MBP’s to add ports/functionality?

 

[OWC Larry]

What ever happened to the bottom case attachment yoy were making for new MBP’s to add ports/functionality?

DEC lives - our Inxtron acquisition adds needed engineering resources to bring the full vision to reality

 

[macgeek01]

If hibernate isn’t supported then I don’t imagine standby will be either. It seems MVME support really comes down to Apple adding the NVME DXE driver in firmware. Bad for OWC if they don’t provide a disclaimer.

 

[greenbreadmmm]

Just installed the 480 into my 13" MacBook Pro 2015.

Here are my before and after.

 

[pichr]

Just installed the 480 into my 13" MacBook Pro 2015.

Here are my before and after.

What about the battery?

 

[mbosse]

[...] Hoping to have real world numbers to share by next week showing the battery benefits in laptops. [...]

Larry, any updates on the battery/power consumption situation?

 

[greenbreadmmm]

What about the battery?

I upgraded to Mojave the week before the swap and didn't have a new baseline for battery.... pretty upset with myself. Thats the one thing I didn't get a before for.

My battery life is definitely worse, but I feel like I had already thought that after upgrading to Mojave.

Tough to say. I may do a swap one day if I get that curious to test.

One thing I can say is my idle wattage has remained the same. I do use istat pro regularly and my resting wattage has remained the same or perhaps gone down .5 watts. However I do feel my battery depleting faster than it has before doing basic web browsing.

Wish I knew for sure if it was Mojave or the drive, because its fast enough that I would return the drive over.

 

[ignatius345]

I upgraded to Mojave the week before the swap and didn't have a new baseline for battery.... pretty upset with myself. Thats the one thing I didn't get a before for.

My battery life is definitely worse, but I feel like I had already thought that after upgrading to Mojave.

Tough to say. I may do a swap one day if I get that curious to test.

One thing I can say is my idle wattage has remained the same. I do use istat pro regularly and my resting wattage has remained the same or perhaps gone down .5 watts. However I do feel my battery depleting faster than it has before doing basic web browsing.

Wish I knew for sure if it was Mojave or the drive, because its fast enough that I would return the drive over.

I mean, I guess you could swap drives again to your old one to test, but that does also sound like a PITA

 

[greenbreadmmm]

I mean, I guess you could swap drives again to your old one to test, but that does also sound like a PITA

I found the culprit. Mojave is Indexing the drive from scratch every time I restart it...

 

[ignatius345]

I found the culprit. Mojave is Indexing the drive from scratch every time I restart it...

Ouch! Is that related at all to the SSD, or just a Spotlight failure that would've happened anyway?

 

[greenbreadmmm]

Ouch! Is that related at all to the SSD, or just a Spotlight failure that would've happened anyway?

Seems like an issue with how the SSD and Mojave communicate.

I never would have a full system spotlight index every time I turn on my computer. That should only happen when you install a new drive / OS.

Returning this ASAP.

 

[ignatius345]

Seems like an issue with how the SSD and Mojave communicate.

I never would have a full system spotlight index every time I turn on my computer. That should only happen when you install a new drive / OS.

Returning this ASAP.

Good to know. That’s definitely a dealbreaker. I wonder if @OWC Larry could speak to this?

 

[1146331]

The deal breaker for me was the lack of hibernation support. I almost bought the drive and glad I read the whole threat. I just paid $260 for a used [oem] 512GB SSD instead of the 1TB OWC drive I was going to buy.

I guess I'll keep lurking and will wait to see what OWC Larry has to say in the future. I'm not patient enough to wait until mid summer for a beta driver.

 

[greenbreadmmm]

Ouch! Is that related at all to the SSD, or just a Spotlight failure that would've happened anyway?

I c

Good to know. That’s definitely a dealbreaker. I wonder if @OWC Larry could speak to this?

So after all indexes and background tasks settled down I did a comparison in battery life from Aura X2 and the stock SSD. I saw a noticeable change in battery life. The quoted time during similar usage and zero background tasks saw 20-30% increase in remaining time projected (yes I know that's nothing conclusive) and a noticeable decrease depletion rate.

This is nothing scientific, but I wanted to do some fairly quick comparisons before I sent this back.

Maybe the index issues is on my end and a bad spotlight file read? I can't say and don't want to claim all drives won't work nice.

But the battery life jump is very noticeable.

 

[mbosse]

I c


So after all indexes and background tasks settled down I did a comparison in battery life from Aura X2 and the stock SSD. I saw a noticeable change in battery life. The quoted time during similar usage and zero background tasks saw 20-30% increase in remaining time projected (yes I know that's nothing conclusive) and a noticeable decrease depletion rate.

This is nothing scientific, but I wanted to do some fairly quick comparisons before I sent this back.

Maybe the index issues is on my end and a bad spotlight file read? I can't say and don't want to claim all drives won't work nice.

But the battery life jump is very noticeable.

So the OWC drives yields a longer power reserve?

 

[greenbreadmmm]

So the OWC drives yields a longer power reserve?

I lost about an average 1.5 hours off my 5 hour normal run time with the x2 installed. I understand it is faster and would use more power, but this was during Netflix, web browning and light usage. Nothing write intensive.

So the OWC drives yields a longer power reserve?

my battery life is substantially better with stock SSD.

 

[mbosse]

I lost about an average 1.5 hours off my 5 hour normal run time with the x2 installed. I understand it is faster and would use more power, but this was during Netflix, web browning and light usage. Nothing write intensive.


my battery life is substantially better with stock SSD.

Thanks for clarification!

 

[1146331]

So I did the firmware mod to enable hibernation on my Mid-2014 MBP. I just have to wait a moth to be able to afford the 1TB drive.

Why is the 2TB drive substantially more expensive? Literally it's $120.00 more than double the price from the 1TB drive. I could see paying 560 for it, but not $680.

Once I buy the drive, I'll post my results here.

 

[minifridge1138]

So I did the firmware mod to enable hibernation on my Mid-2014 MBP. I just have to wait a moth to be able to afford the 1TB drive.

Why is the 2TB drive substantially more expensive? Literally it's $120.00 more than double the price from the 1TB drive. I could see paying 560 for it, but not $680.

Once I buy the drive, I'll post my results here.

I don't want to derail the thread, but could you post a link to instructions for the mod to enable hibernate?

 

[1146331]

I don't want to derail the thread, but could you post a link to instructions for the mod to enable hibernate?

https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...sd-to-m-2-nvme.2034976/page-162#post-27299768

Also, I used this ZIP file for my instructions, I lost the original link to this file but I believe it was somewhere in the above thread.

Depending on the version of OS X you have as well as the Mac, you will have to change some steps. PM me if you need help, my mod was fairly easy but I can't confirm that hibernate works...yet. Once I get an OWC drive, I'll let you all know.

I might have to flash the nvme driver with a different version but so far everything with the OEM drive works, no crashes, etc.

NOTE: In the link in the thread above, it says to use a specific version of the UEFI tool. I used version 0.24, the newest version does not allow rom images to be modded, just viewed.

 

[Sandris]

If hibernate isn’t supported then I don’t imagine standby will be either. It seems MVME support really comes down to Apple adding the NVME DXE driver in firmware. Bad for OWC if they don’t provide a disclaimer.

I am one more client who

Thank you for asking!

We resolved this some time ago - a long time ago - no issue today with hibernation in any model - including the late 2013 Retina models that were the first Apple MacBook Pro models to utilize PCIe SSD.

Dear Larry,

You mislead forum members as the issue with sleep mode is not solved. I had long chat with technical support and offer was to disable sleep mode or ship back Auro Pro X2 to OWC.

Chat file in attachment.

I really do not understand why the issue is not mentioned as a disclaimer by OWC.

 

[nicho]

Chat file in attachment.

I hope that's not your personal address in the attachment. If it is, I'd remove the attachement and blank it out then reupload if i were you

 

[spyguy10709]

[doublepost=1555504232][/doublepost]Beyond just the hardware side, the other aspect is that the firmware we've evolved over many years for the moving Apple requirements is specific on our drives to be seamless for all Apple & Mac OS requirements. That is not the case with other hacked in solutions and such is reflected in issues commonly reported with such adapted/hack 'solutions'.

Just quoting OWCLarry in case anyone forgot those bold claims. This was just part of what I thought was a fairly flippant response to my suggestion to other users to just get an NVME adapter for their MacBooks. If you're comfortable disabling hibernate like the OWC drives require you to do, adapting a commodity NVME SSD to your macbook can have equal if not better results for far less money.

EDIT

I now see that Larry has previously walked back his claims of support, and now states that a driver should be available in early summer (tick-tock) to enable more complete support on older machines. We'll see.

 

[nicho]

I now see that Larry has previously walked back his claims of support, and now states that a driver should be available in early summer (tick-tock) to enable more complete support on older machines. We'll see.

Early summer? The summer solstice was on Friday, early summer has been and gone.