I have a late-2013 15" MacBook Pro and decided to try the "unofficial" SSD upgrade route that maybe a few others here have done: using the Sintech sled adapter card to put a standard M.2 NVMe drive into the MBP's proprietary SSD slot.
I believe I've done everything needed to make this a successful upgrade (eventually, as I'll explain below!):
1- update MacOS on the existing stock SSD to Mojave (10.14.6), which installs the firmware to allow the MBP to boot from a standard NVMe drive.
2- Install the 660P, boot from a USB stick with a bootable Mojave installer, initialize the SSD.
3- Install MacOS on the 660P.
My computer boots from the 660P and works, however the "System Reports" shows the "Link Width" (PCIe lanes) as "2x" where it should be 4x. The interesting (and frustrating) thing is that when I first installed the drive, I initialized it incorrectly with an Apple Partition Map and HFS+ file system. I then restored my system and user data from a Time Machine backup and weirdly enough my MBP booted from the SSD (Intel Macs are supposed to not be bootable from APM drives, only those with GUID partition maps). At that time I ran the Blackmagic Disk Speed test and got 4x speed, around 1400MB/sec read & writes (my computer does PCIe 2.0, not 3.0). After noticing some weird stuff like the Startup Disk setting not sticking, I discovered the mistake I'd made initializing the drive. I reinitialized it with a GUID partition scheme and APFS file system. To be safe I downloaded a fresh Mojave 10.14.6 installer, re-installed the OS and now my PCIe lanes are showing as 2x and read/write speeds have halved!
So far I have done only what's obvious to me to try and troubleshoot why I'm only at 2x: reset the SMC & NVRAM, and cleaned and re-seated the Sintech adapter sled and SSD (I'm fairly confident they are installed correctly).
Could this be a malfunction in the SSD or adapter card? My research has shown that I am running the latest Boot Rom Version for my machine (156.0.0.0.0) and the fact that I can boot the computer from the SSD shows that I must have done that part right. A lot of this stuff is a bit above my pay grade but I'm not afraid to type some terminal commands if anyone knows of tools that might help me get to the bottom of this. What would cause a disk that's known to support 4x lanes show up as 2x? Thanks in advance for any replies!
I believe I've done everything needed to make this a successful upgrade (eventually, as I'll explain below!):
1- update MacOS on the existing stock SSD to Mojave (10.14.6), which installs the firmware to allow the MBP to boot from a standard NVMe drive.
2- Install the 660P, boot from a USB stick with a bootable Mojave installer, initialize the SSD.
3- Install MacOS on the 660P.
My computer boots from the 660P and works, however the "System Reports" shows the "Link Width" (PCIe lanes) as "2x" where it should be 4x. The interesting (and frustrating) thing is that when I first installed the drive, I initialized it incorrectly with an Apple Partition Map and HFS+ file system. I then restored my system and user data from a Time Machine backup and weirdly enough my MBP booted from the SSD (Intel Macs are supposed to not be bootable from APM drives, only those with GUID partition maps). At that time I ran the Blackmagic Disk Speed test and got 4x speed, around 1400MB/sec read & writes (my computer does PCIe 2.0, not 3.0). After noticing some weird stuff like the Startup Disk setting not sticking, I discovered the mistake I'd made initializing the drive. I reinitialized it with a GUID partition scheme and APFS file system. To be safe I downloaded a fresh Mojave 10.14.6 installer, re-installed the OS and now my PCIe lanes are showing as 2x and read/write speeds have halved!
So far I have done only what's obvious to me to try and troubleshoot why I'm only at 2x: reset the SMC & NVRAM, and cleaned and re-seated the Sintech adapter sled and SSD (I'm fairly confident they are installed correctly).
Could this be a malfunction in the SSD or adapter card? My research has shown that I am running the latest Boot Rom Version for my machine (156.0.0.0.0) and the fact that I can boot the computer from the SSD shows that I must have done that part right. A lot of this stuff is a bit above my pay grade but I'm not afraid to type some terminal commands if anyone knows of tools that might help me get to the bottom of this. What would cause a disk that's known to support 4x lanes show up as 2x? Thanks in advance for any replies!
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