macbook air ssd option? SK Hynix PE3110 Enterprise M.2 960GB SSD

ptgeraldptgerald
in Mobile Macs

Hi,

Love your site, guides and discussions! Thanks! Navigating Apple's proprietary systems and till upgrade is a jungle. Thanks for being an oasis.I recently bought my first Macbook Air (Early 2015). I want to upgrade the SSD. I found your ssd upgrade guide, sadly after chasing answers all over the internet first.

I wanted to know what you thought of the SK Hynix PE3110 Enterprise M.2 960GB SSD and if they are compatible with the early 2015 macbook air and the Sintech adapter? They run considerably cheaper than the Samsung Evo 960 and I wanted to know if you think it is a viable option?

Thanks!!!

Gerald

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Comments

  • stephanstephan

    Hi Gerald,

    thank you very much and welcome on board!

    The idea of using the SK Hynix PE3110 Enterprise M.2 960GB SSD is not bad. We run into a mechanical problem though: as this model follows the 22110 form factor it just does not fit. The MacBook Pro can use 2280 SSDs. The first two numbers describe the width, the following the length in mm. Meaning in our case that the Hynix is 30 mm too long for the MacBook.

    You have to pick another NVMe SSD which follows the 2280 format.

    Let us now how it turns out! :)

    Thanks
    Stephan

  • ptgeraldptgerald
    edited July 2018

    Thanks Stephan for the advice and education.

    So do you any thoughts on the Adata XPG SX8000 PCIe 1 TB 3D NAND MLC NVMe Gen3x4 M.2 2280 SSD for a macbook AIR (early 2015) with the Sintech adapter? or the 1TB Samsung PM981 1024GB NVMe PM981 MZVLB1T0HALR PCIe Gen 3 NVMe SSD M.2

    How do they compare to the Samsung evo 960 ssds for a 2015 Macbook air uupgrade?

    Thanks again.

    Gerald

  • ptgeraldptgerald

    I pretty much have it narrowed down to the adata drive, a samsubg evo 960, think but wonder what's the difference in the samsung PM981. lol

  • stephanstephan

    Hi Gerald,

    I would go for the Evo. The Adata seems to have some performance issues. The PM981 is new and should work, I didn't test it though. You would be pioneer. :)

    Thanks for your input,
    Stephan

  • ptgeraldptgerald

    Thank Stephan! I'll keep you posted.

  • ptgeraldptgerald

    here is a great benchmark comparison of the PM981 vs the Evo 960

    http://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Samsung-PM981-NVMe-PCIe-M2-512GB-vs-Samsung-960-Evo-NVMe-PCIe-M2-1TB/m401452vsm211052

  • stephanstephan

    Thank you!

  • ptgeraldptgerald

    no problem. MY only concern with the PM981 is making sure there is a driver that will work well with the macbook air.

    I'll let you know what I decide.

    Best,

    G

  • stephanstephan

    As long as it is NVMe, it shall work. If it doesn't, they will just not play together nicely, which is a problem on other levels then. The drivers are very stable.

  • ptgeraldptgerald

    Thanks.

  • ptgeraldptgerald
    edited August 2018

    Hey Stephan,

      I ended up grabbing a 1TB Samsung 970 SSD m.22280 NVMe drive for my early 2015 macbook air with a sintech adapter. I grabbed it off of Amazon for $349.

  Install went pretty easy but I got an error trying to restore from my back up.  I'm working to resolve that now

    In the meanwhile I installed High Seirra from a bootable flash drive and the machine is running well. the pic shows the speeds I'm getting.

    Thanks for your help.

    I'm still going to try and figure out how to restore the time machine back up and stated by resetting the NVRam. always another adventure! lol!

  • ptgeraldptgerald

  • ptgeraldptgerald

    One more question, do pcie, nvme drives need to have TRIM enabled?

  • stephanstephan

    Hi Gerald,

    thanks for your post and great to see it works so well! You can check if TRIM is enabled in Apple > About this Mac > System Report > NVMExpress. If not, open Terminal and type

    sudo trimforce enable

    Confirm with your password and after a restart you should be done.

    About your backup: Just go to Applications > Other > Migration Assistant. From there, it should do all the work automatically. ;)

    Best,
    Stephan

  • ptgeraldptgerald

    Trim support says YES. :)

    Fortunately, I've encountered none of the reported standby problems with the ssd and sintech adapter!

    I'm really happy to have this in and have it running so fast. I'm getting almost 3x the speed of my old macbook pro with a crucial mx500 sata ssd in it and now have the portability of a macbook air. Now if I could just up my ram to 16 or 32GB. LOL! We can't win them all!

    Thank again for all of the help.

  • ptgeraldptgerald

    Stephan,

    Two more questions, if you don't mind?

    The EVO 970 supports S.M.A.R.T. but it's not showing up as SMART enabled?

    and I want to confirm that "Trim Support: Yes" means TRIM is actually enabled. sounds like a silly question, lol.

    thanks

    Gerald

    configuration:
    Macbook Air early 2015
    samsung Evo 970 1TB
    Sintech adapter

  • stephanstephan
    edited August 2018

    Hi Gerald,

    if it says yes, it is activated. Apple is pretty correct about these things. :)

    SMART status is actually not supported - by Apple. They decided to no support this standard anymore with the introduction of NVMe SSDs. As it is a standard developed for mechanical drives Apple figured that it would be not necessary to support it for solid state drives. Even my MacBook 12" with original SSD does not support it:
    https://macandegg.com/2018/07/how-to-check-the-hard-drive-smart-status-on-macos/

    That does not mean that some SSD manufacturer do not still support it, but you would not get data from Apple's software. Try the linked tool, maybe that will read some SMART information from the Samsung drive.

    Best,
    Stephan

  • ptgeraldptgerald

    thanks!

  • ptgeraldptgerald

    Hey Stephan, I'm upgrading my early 2015 macbook pro from 1TB to 2Tb. I have the sintech adapter but will it work with a Sabrent NVMe PCI3 M.22280 2TB drive?

    Thanks

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