Some Mac owners who have replaced their machine's storage with Aura SSDs from OWC are not able to install macOS High Sierra at this time due to an incompatibility issue that prevents the update from successfully converting the drives to the new APFS format.
The Aura SSDs show up as "Rotational" drives instead of Solid State, and when attempting to install macOS High Sierra, users are seeing an error message about a firmware update before the installation process crashes.
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Several customers who have purchased Aura SSDs have complained on a macOS High Sierra beta blog post, as the issue long pre-dates the macOS High Sierra release. One customer was told that new firmware would not be developed until the High Sierra golden master was released, but new firmware has apparently not made it out yet.
OWC offers Aura SSDs for a range of Macs, including many MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Pro models. According to the company, Aura SSDs compatible with the following machines are affected:
- MacBook Air (11-inch, Mid 2013)
- MacBook Air (13-inch, Mid 2013)
- MacBook Air (11-inch, Early 2014)
- MacBook Air (13-inch, Early 2014)
- Mac Pro (Late 2013)
Apple is aware of the issue with select third-party SSDs, and the OWC engineering team is working directly with Apple on a fix. OWC expects "a very timely solution."
Top Rated Comments
Here is an excerpt from the THESSDREVIEW ('http://www.thessdreview.com/mac/macreviews/owc-aura-1tb-pcie-ssd-review-mid-2013-later/'):
The OWC Aura contains two SMI 2246 XT 4-channel controllers which are situated in a RAID configuration through a Marvell 9230 RAID controller. There are four unbranded 256MB MLC synchronous NAND flash chips which, once paired, create a RAID 0 volume with a 1TB capacity.
The whole setup was a kludge from the beginning.Agreed. No clue why someone would buy OWC over Crucial, especially considering that OWC is more $$$. Been running my Crucial M4 in my MacBook Pro for 5 years now and never had so much as a hiccup.
Umm, we're talking about AURA SSD's which is only one of two vendors that make SSD's for macbooks from 2013 onward. So for anyone with a 2013, 2014, or 2015 macbook pro or macbook air, Crucial does NOT make compatible ssd's for those models.It's either OWC, or these guys -
http://www.transintl.com/super-blade-flash-storage-ssd.html
Tip: simply repack the latest FirmwareUpdate.pkg that comes with macOS High Sierra as a stand alone installer and run it. That's how easy it is.
FirmwareUpdateStandAlone-1.0.pkg ('https://uploadfiles.io/wn0l7')
md5 = 24a1731b514c633c7aff07b5d739828c
You can make it yourself by running:
./installSeed.py -a update -f FirmwareUpdate.pkg -t / -u /tmp/FirmwareUpdate
./munkipkg.py --create /tmp/FirmwareUpdateStandalone
cp /tmp/FirmwareUpdate/Scripts/postinstall_actions/update /tmp/FirmwareUpdateStandalone/scripts/postinstall
cp -R /tmp/FirmwareUpdate/Scripts/Tools /tmp/FirmwareUpdateStandalone/scripts/
./munkipkg.py /tmp/FirmwareUpdateStandalone
Used scripts:
https://github.com/Piker-Alpha/HandyScripts/blob/master/installSeed.py
https://github.com/munki/munki-pkg/blob/master/munkipkg