Upgrading 2013-2015 Macbook Pro SSD to M.2 NVMe

[glin90]

I have a mid-2015 15” MBP running Mojave with a Sabrent Rocket 2TB drive with the Sintech adapter.

I wanted to report power usage while sleeping. Using defaults, I closed the laptop and set it on the counter overnight. It started with 100% battery that has about 480 cycles on it. It was closed for 8 hours and went down to 98%. Will report back in a couple more hours when I get to the office to see what it’s at.

At 8 hours into sleep without power connection it was 98% as I stated above. I opened the lid, looked at it, and closed it again. It has now been 3 hours later and it has gone down another 3% to 95%.

I'm guessing that it must have went into hibernation overnight. Not sure what the default time is for that, I'd have to look at what it's set for I'm pmset. See below..
View attachment 845157

Based on your settings I think it enters hibernation after 10800 seconds, which is exactly 3h. That's the default value.

 

[yosh22]

Hi guys,

I am here on a late mbp 2013 and put a Sx8200pro, sinetec B, hibernate and autopoweroff on 0, everything was fine under 10.14.3. I think since I updated to 10.14.5 my macbook shuts down on it´s own after a period of sleep. When i open it again it boots new and always 2 times in a row. I don´t think it´s great for the data.. if you have any idea that would be great help.

 

[jackqueenking]

I have a mid-2015 15” MBP running Mojave with a Sabrent Rocket 2TB drive with the Sintech adapter.

I wanted to report power usage while sleeping. Using defaults, I closed the laptop and set it on the counter overnight. It started with 100% battery that has about 480 cycles on it. It was closed for 8 hours and went down to 98%. Will report back in a couple more hours when I get to the office to see what it’s at.

At 8 hours into sleep without power connection it was 98% as I stated above. I opened the lid, looked at it, and closed it again. It has now been 3 hours later and it has gone down another 3% to 95%.

I'm guessing that it must have went into hibernation overnight. Not sure what the default time is for that, I'd have to look at what it's set for I'm pmset. See below..
View attachment 845157

Based on your battery level your mac would not have entered hibernate mode given that standbydelayhigh is set to 86400 seconds otherwise known as 24 hours. Standbydelaylow = 10800 seconds only takes effect when your battery level is below a certain percentage. If your standby mode is set to 3 your ram would remain powered on as well as your hard drive until your mac drains its battery, this mode utilizes battery power because the SSD remains powered. If its set to 25 then eventually it would shut off completely writing an image to the SSD before hand so you can safely restore.

In my experience with a 2014 MBP, if I charge it to 100%, overnight it will lose 1-2% but as the battery drains if i close the lid it will lose more battery in a shorter period of time simply because the NVME draws more power than the OEM SSD.

If you have a 2015+ MBP you can address this issue by changing standby = 0 and hibernatemode = 25 so once you close the lid or sleep the mac it will go directly into hibernate and cut power to all components. You can't keep the default settings that come with the MAC even if you have a 2015 as the power draw is no longer the same, otherwise you'll continue to experience battery drain even if your mac supports NVME correctly. Apple guarantees the mac can stay in hibernate mode 3 up to 30 days with the ssd in low power state because the OEM drives were designed for this, if you switch to NVME you will have higher power draw and as such Apple design specifications are no longer satisfied.
[doublepost=1561576819][/doublepost]

Hi guys,

I am here on a late mbp 2013 and put a Sx8200pro, sinetec B, hibernate and autopoweroff on 0, everything was fine under 10.14.3. I think since I updated to 10.14.5 my macbook shuts down on it´s own after a period of sleep. When i open it again it boots new and always 2 times in a row. I don´t think it´s great for the data.. if you have any idea that would be great help.

Do a reset of the PRAM and NVRam (Google it) then go into your settings ensure that the energy settings are restored to default, then run the command on the first page of this thread to disable autopoweroff, standby and hibernate and restart your mac. It could be that your settings are stuck in mode 3 or 25 which is causing the double restart when your mac goes to sleep.

 

[Allistah]

Thanks for the tip on the hibernate mode 25. Will look into that. It sounds like the right mode for these machines after the upgrade.

Also curious if anyone has encrypted their drives and if so how much performance hit they took. I’d like to encrypt my drive but don’t want to do it if the perf takes a good hit. I would expect some performance hit, just curious if anyone has done it and what their experience has been.

 

[BombKilla]

@Allistah, might the "sleep prevented by sharingd" be part of the issue? That line shows up in several related threads and consistently refers to having sharing enabled directly, or using some app that enables elements of sharing.
FWIW my 11,5/Sabrent 2T did the same thing as yours; it seemed like a lot of current usage considering I closed the lid at 100%, checked it about 10-12 hours later, and the battery was down to 93% or so (I hadn't learned about the sharing service blocking deep sleep at that point).

 

[Colin0317]

Is there a chance that apple updates the boot rom for the 2014 MacBook Pro when Catalina is released to fix the hibernation issue?

 

[jackqueenking]

@Allistah, might the "sleep prevented by sharingd" be part of the issue? That line shows up in several related threads and consistently refers to having sharing enabled directly, or using some app that enables elements of sharing.
FWIW my 11,5/Sabrent 2T did the same thing as yours; it seemed like a lot of current usage considering I closed the lid at 100%, checked it about 10-12 hours later, and the battery was down to 93% or so (I hadn't learned about the sharing service blocking deep sleep at that point).

This would only be a problem if there's a bug within that particular feature of the system which has happened in the past, i believe when mojave was first released there was some problems with the computer going to sleep properly. If this was actually still a problem he/she would be experiencing the same issue with the OEM apple ssd but in this case the problem is simply because the NVM drive draws more power.

 

[glin90]

I

Hi everyone,

long story this evening...

I did some test with patching the BootRom on my trusty late 2013 rMBP.
It's too soon to tell that the patch I did was successful, but at present it seems to work.

Here is what I wanted to do : I had previously watched into and compared BootRom files between rMBP late 2013 and early - mid 2015.
I had extracted EFI payloads files from the High Sierra installer, and compared them with UEFI tool.
I had seen some differences between the NVMe DXE drivers include in the BootRoms : all DXE drivers are located at an address starting with 51116915, but those from 2013-2014 macs bootroms all have a size of 10382 bytes, while all DXE drivers from 2015 and later macs are 25820 bytes wide.
Also, 2015 macs have an NVMe entry in the compiled DSDT table included in the EFI.

I must also say I had previously success with patching an UEFI of an old Fujitsu TX140 server (I did successfully added to its UEFI/bios a generic NVMe DXE driver in order to make it recognize NVMe drives at boot : https://twitter.com/gillesaurejac/status/995418694875537409).

So I wanted to do the same with my late 2013 rMBP, and edit its BootRom so that it would include the proper NVME driver and DSDT table reference.

Here is what I did :
- I bought an EFI cable at MacUnlocks : https://macunlocks.com/product/efi-flex-cable-for-macbook-air-pro-2010-2016/
- I already had an SPI programmer, a little EZP-2013 which does works great (even under windows 8.1 64 bits)

Ok, so the first tries were epic fails...
The dump of BootRom I did were never the same, and the rom file was not editable in UEFI tool. I was too scared of briking my rMBP.
What was in cause ? I thought I had a bad cable, or any other problem, and managed to unsoldered the SPI rom and connect it directly on the EZP programmer... With no luck : I had the same unreliable results. Worse, in desoldering the SPI rom I did loose some resistor, and had to read the schematics and find some new 33k resistors and solder them in the proper place... eeehhh...

Once the SPI rom again in place, I did some googling and find that other had same problems : I have read somewhere (here : https://www.ghostlyhaks.com/forum/macbook/234-flashing-micron-25q064a-on-mba-2013-2014) that the power supplied by the SPI programmer wasn't strong enough...
So I did a little mod to my programmer and added an iPhone battery to provide it a 3.7-3.9V supply (not so clean but sorry... I was lazy this time).

And that time the dump of the SPI eeprom worked, I could even do it with the logic board in place, without having to desolder anything !

What next : with the full dump of my SPI bootrom, I could to some patch to it without any fear to brick my mac.

So I did extract the full BootRom, and did the following :
- open the BootRom of a rMBP 2015 with UEFI Tool for Mac, find the NVMe DXE driver and extract it
- open the BootRom of my rMBP 2013 with UEFI Tool for Mac, and replace the NVMe DXE driver with the new one from the 2015.

Next the DSDT Table :
- find and extract the compiled (assembly langage) DSDT table of a 2015 Mac, and decompile it with MacIASL
- find and extract the compiled (assembly langage) DSDT table from my 2013 Mac, and decompile it with MacIASL
- compare the difference to add the NVMe reference (I know nothing in ACPI tables, I just add at line 288 the line "NVME, 8" just before "Offset 0x12C)
- recompile the DSDT table as an aml file, and insert it back in the BootRom of my 2013 mac.
[EDIT 2018-05-30] : seems the whole DSDT table edition is not necessary.

Then I just flashed inplace my BootRom with the obtained file.

And the result : the NVMe SSD is still orange at startup menu, but who cares...
Startup is now without any delay...
Hibernation now works fully... (I tested 4 times, with setting standby to 1 and standbydelay to 10s)

I think some tests need to be done, but a step has been made !

I've seen in your pictures that the rom is not located between your keyboard and logic board. Can you confirm if that's the case for 13" rmbp mid 2014?

I would like to do the bootrom hack myself but I've read here that in my macbook the room is on the other side of the logic board making it almost inaccessible. Tbh I don't think I want to take the board out and flip it...

 

[replicon1]

I installed a brand new Sabrent 1TB and Sintech (short) adapter in my Macbook Pro 15" (mid 2015). All seemed to be good, despite the battery running down considerably faster than before but that should be expected I guess, until the Macbook reached the stage where it was going into sleep mode at which point I woke it by pressing a key and then it failed with a kernal panic - nvme: "Fatal error occurred. Has this happened to anyone else with this model? If so how did you fix the problem?

 

[Blacklive]

Good Day for everyone
I have Macbook Pro 15 Late 2013 with 500GB, APPLE SSD SM0512F, and I want to upgrade it to 1TB.
- Is there any SSD M.2 without NVMe, with speed of around 1500 W/R to avoid the problem of hibernation ?
- Is it right that, there is no M.2 with NVMe can work on my Macbook without problem of hibernation ?
- Is it right that, the maximum speed I can get is not more than 2000MB/s ?
- Is there any SSD with consumption/heat less than APPLE SSD SM0512F ? Is that will effect positive with my battery life ?
- If there is no SSD M.2 without NVMe can support speed 1500MB/s, what is the problem if I disable the hibernation ?
Thanks for your support

 

[Allistah]

@Allistah, might the "sleep prevented by sharingd" be part of the issue? That line shows up in several related threads and consistently refers to having sharing enabled directly, or using some app that enables elements of sharing.
FWIW my 11,5/Sabrent 2T did the same thing as yours; it seemed like a lot of current usage considering I closed the lid at 100%, checked it about 10-12 hours later, and the battery was down to 93% or so (I hadn't learned about the sharing service blocking deep sleep at that point).

One of the other people suggested that I change the hibernation mode to 25, and standby to 0 I think. I'm going to play with it to find out what's optimum for myself. I think overnight is fine to not fully power off and write out a file so I may set that to about 12 or 14 hours or something. That way once that amount of time goes by it would only lose 3-4% but then turn completely off by fully hibernating.

I'm not sure if thats the better route or to just set it to go into deep hibernation (fully off) after about 3 hours. Once it's off, then it can't wait up for the benefit of power naps and stuff which I like the idea of. Maybe the 12-14 hours of sleep before deep hibernation is the better route now that I'm saying it. I'll have to play with it and see how it goes.

 

[jackqueenking]

One of the other people suggested that I change the hibernation mode to 25, and standby to 0 I think. I'm going to play with it to find out what's optimum for myself. I think overnight is fine to not fully power off and write out a file so I may set that to about 12 or 14 hours or something. That way once that amount of time goes by it would only lose 3-4% but then turn completely off by fully hibernating.

I'm not sure if thats the better route or to just set it to go into deep hibernation (fully off) after about 3 hours. Once it's off, then it can't wait up for the benefit of power naps and stuff which I like the idea of. Maybe the 12-14 hours of sleep before deep hibernation is the better route now that I'm saying it. I'll have to play with it and see how it goes.

If I were you I would just enable hibernation mode 25 and set standby to 0, the difference in the amount of time your mac would need to wake from hibernate mode 25 and sleep is negligible, unless you can't afford to wait an extra 3 seconds for the session to restore its worth the extra battery savings.

 

[DJDO]

Upgraded my 2015 13 inch Macbook Pro with a 1TB Sabrent Rocket, short green Sintech adapter.
No problems whatsoever, it was plug and play, everything is working as expected.

I did find out that the battery is swollen and I have to replace it, which will be an adventure. When I do that I'll also replace the termal paste on the CPU since I've been reading that helps a lot with the temperatures.

 

[Gen]

I decided to keep my 2015 13" for at least two more years, and with that I can't go on with 12 Gb of free storage space... I think I've settled on this Silicon Power P34A80 drive:

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07L6DKM8V/ref=ox_sc_saved_title_2?smid=A25SITGFW0OQJA&psc=1

based on this Anandtech review:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/1395...-ssd-review-phison-e12-with-newer-firmware/10

and that the Amazon has the 512 GB version for only $60.

since speed is close enough to the same for most of these ideally I wanted to get the Intel 660P:

https://smile.amazon.com/Intel-660p...=gateway&sa-no-redirect=1&sr=8-3&x=0&y=0&th=1

and I just realized the Intel drive came down in price, to the same $60, and generally has better idle power consumption:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13078/the-intel-ssd-660p-ssd-review-qlc-nand-arrives/8


which drive is the better option to go with?

 

[liberace]

I decided to keep my 2015 13" for at least two more years, and with that I can't go on with 12 Gb of free storage space... I think I've settled on this Silicon Power P34A80 drive:

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07L6DKM8V/ref=ox_sc_saved_title_2?smid=A25SITGFW0OQJA&psc=1

based on this Anandtech review:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/1395...-ssd-review-phison-e12-with-newer-firmware/10

and that the Amazon has the 512 GB version for only $60.

since speed is close enough to the same for most of these ideally I wanted to get the Intel 660P:

https://smile.amazon.com/Intel-660p-1-0TB-80mm-978350/dp/B07GBKQ9ST/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=intel+660p&qid=1561660320&s=gateway&sa-no-redirect=1&sr=8-3&x=0&y=0&th=1

and I just realized the Intel drive came down in price, to the same $60, and generally has better idle power consumption:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13078/the-intel-ssd-660p-ssd-review-qlc-nand-arrives/8


which drive is the better option to go with?

as I notice from here 660p one of the worst with battery drain because of some firmware 'issue' *I guess* after some session of loads while idle drive could still drain like its still writing about 30 min
so I couldn't recommend it for sure

 

[trentemoller]

I decided to keep my 2015 13" for at least two more years, and with that I can't go on with 12 Gb of free storage space... I think I've settled on this Silicon Power P34A80 drive:

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07L6DKM8V/ref=ox_sc_saved_title_2?smid=A25SITGFW0OQJA&psc=1

based on this Anandtech review:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/1395...-ssd-review-phison-e12-with-newer-firmware/10

and that the Amazon has the 512 GB version for only $60.

since speed is close enough to the same for most of these ideally I wanted to get the Intel 660P:

https://smile.amazon.com/Intel-660p-1-0TB-80mm-978350/dp/B07GBKQ9ST/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=intel+660p&qid=1561660320&s=gateway&sa-no-redirect=1&sr=8-3&x=0&y=0&th=1

and I just realized the Intel drive came down in price, to the same $60, and generally has better idle power consumption:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13078/the-intel-ssd-660p-ssd-review-qlc-nand-arrives/8


which drive is the better option to go with?

I am also interested in the Silicon Power drive, but the 1tb model, which is currently $109.99 on Amazon. I didn't come across any negative reports in browsing this thread, so I'm going to go ahead and order it tomorrow morning, and I'll report any issues I come across.

 

[beren12]

I installed a brand new Sabrent 1TB and Sintech (short) adapter in my Macbook Pro 15" (mid 2015). All seemed to be good, despite the battery running down considerably faster than before but that should be expected I guess, until the Macbook reached the stage where it was going into sleep mode at which point I woke it by pressing a key and then it failed with a kernal panic - nvme: "Fatal error occurred. Has this happened to anyone else with this model? If so how did you fix the problem?

I've been getting panics the last 11 days, at least one a day. I have a 2tb mp510 and the long sintech adaptor. Not sure where the problem is, but I had no issues the first month. Not happy about it, it sometimes happens when it wakes, and sometimes when i'm using it. I have a mid-2015 as well.

 

[Audit13]

Good Day for everyone
I have Macbook Pro 15 Late 2013 with 500GB, APPLE SSD SM0512F, and I want to upgrade it to 1TB.
- Is there any SSD M.2 without NVMe, with speed of around 1500 W/R to avoid the problem of hibernation ?
- Is it right that, there is no M.2 with NVMe can work on my Macbook without problem of hibernation ?
- Is it right that, the maximum speed I can get is not more than 2000MB/s ?
- Is there any SSD with consumption/heat less than APPLE SSD SM0512F ? Is that will effect positive with my battery life ?
- If there is no SSD M.2 without NVMe can support speed 1500MB/s, what is the problem if I disable the hibernation ?
Thanks for your support

You cannot avoid the hibernation issue with a nvme drive unless you are able to flash a modded bootrom. You have to use an OEM Apple SSD to avoid this issue.

The PCIe 2.0 bus in your MacBook will limit read and write speeds.

There is no nvme drive that will run as cool or use as little battery as the original Apple SSD.

If you disable hibernation, the MacBook will drain battery with the lid closed because the MacBook will never write the contents to the SSD and power itself off.

 

[risentesla]

Hi guys, just signed up after a year of lurking and needing help.

I have a Macbook Pro 15" 2015 and are having issues with restarts. I am using the short black sintech adapter with an SX8200 Pro (just installed them last May), but my mac keeps experiencing restarts after a long sleep/hibernate in the night. I already tried setting pmset hibernate mode from 0 to 25 and back to 0, as well as autopoweroff and standby. So far it has no battery issues, including battery drains while it's off.

I noticed that this problem should not be happening to the 2015 model.

Does anyone have an idea on what to do about this? Thanks for the help!

 

[pcuser01]

Anyone tried following for Samsung 970 EVO plus,it seems that 970 EVO plus can work:
"There is a bootable iso from Samsung. You can insert the ssd and the stick with the iso gets reconized automatically. Then you can update the ssd right on The mac with no os. After that you can install the mac os from a stick or like i did with the cmd + Alt + r key at booting and install mojave."

 

[yosh22]

Do a reset of the PRAM and NVRam (Google it) then go into your settings ensure that the energy settings are restored to default, then run the command on the first page of this thread to disable autopoweroff, standby and hibernate and restart your mac. It could be that your settings are stuck in mode 3 or 25 which is causing the double restart when your mac goes to sleep.

Problem solved. Thanks a lot for the quick help.

 

[Gen]

as I notice from here 660p one of the worst with battery drain because of some firmware 'issue' *I guess* after some session of loads while idle drive could still drain like its still writing about 30 min
so I couldn't recommend it for sure

shoot... the anand article mentions the 660P having some of the lowest idle times : /

 

[jackqueenking]

as I notice from here 660p one of the worst with battery drain because of some firmware 'issue' *I guess* after some session of loads while idle drive could still drain like its still writing about 30 min
so I couldn't recommend it for sure

This isn't exactly a firmware issue it is just how QLC drives operate, or it might just be intel's implementation of QLC drives. After the R/W operations complete the drive spends time writing data back from the cache to the drive so there's less idle time, even though your mac isn't doing any R/W operations the drive itself is utilizing power to perform other operations. From this forum I believe that are other QLC drives which perform better, the 660p is better used in a desktop or iMac where battery life isn't a concern.

 

[Rh92887]

Hi all,

I have a mid-2015 rMBP and upgraded to 1TB Crucial P1 using the long (ST-NGFF2013-C NGFF) Sintech adaptor. I updated to 10.14.5 before the hardware upgrade and restored my mac from a time machine backup.

I have kernel panics when opening the lid. I reset NVRAM and SMC with no luck. I read in other posts that I should reset power settings to default and change to "standby = 0 and hibernatemode = 25." For some reason I thought the long adaptor and having a 2015 MBP would exempt me from lid opening problems, I guess I got that wrong?

If I do the above power setting change, what sort of other issues will I run into as future MacOS updates happen? I go to school abroad and really can't run into future issues, so if the change above isn't a long term and permanent fix, I'll likely undo it all and chuck the new components. My threshold for running into future problems is almost nil.

Thanks for taking the time to read this, appreciate any help you can offer. I've attached my panic details in-case that helps.

 

[Gunmoule]

Hi all,

I have a mid-2015 rMBP and upgraded to 1TB Crucial P1 using the long (ST-NGFF2013-C NGFF) Sintech adaptor. I updated to 10.14.5 before the hardware upgrade and restored my mac from a time machine backup.

I have kernel panics when opening the lid. I reset NVRAM and SMC with no luck. I read in other posts that I should reset power settings to default and change to "standby = 0 and hibernatemode = 25." For some reason I thought the long adaptor and having a 2015 MBP would exempt me from lid opening problems, I guess I got that wrong?

If I do the above power setting change, what sort of other issues will I run into as future MacOS updates happen? I go to school abroad and really can't run into future issues, so if the change above isn't a long term and permanent fix, I'll likely undo it all and chuck the new components. My threshold for running into future problems is almost nil.

Thanks for taking the time to read this, appreciate any help you can offer. I've attached my panic details in-case that helps.

First guess would be try reseating the drive, making sure everything is in place and nothing is loose. Check that your adapter is properly insulated like shown in the Wikipost