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

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

Things like these make me bitter that everything these days is soldered on to the Motherboard.... I'll likely stick with my 2015 mac till that changes.

I really hope the reliability is improved on these. I heard only bad things about the first gen of these.

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

Here are my before and after.

I was looking online today about it. I guess a lot of these aftermarket SSD upgrades are NVMe, but Apple's bootrom doesn't fully support sleep/hibernation with these. Looks like there are workarounds (disabling hibernation, or installing a modded rom/firmware), but either disable something, or are hard to do for the basic consumer.

Kinda wish there was a similar upgrade for the 5K iMac. Would be fun to get a Fusion drive, and upgrade both the SSD & HDD.

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.

Would this very much improve the responsiveness of a 2013 MBA 11"? It's got only 4GB of RAM and is a little laggy at times these days under Mojave. Wondering realistically if dropping a faster SSD into it would help a lot. For just over a hundred bucks I could also almost double its 128GB storage...
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Things like these make me bitter that everything these days is soldered on to the Motherboard.... I'll likely stick with my 2015 mac till that changes.

:( I think you're gonna be waiting a long time. Apple plugged that little hole in their revenue stream a while ago. At this point, the Mac Mini and the 5K iMac are the only things you can upgrade RAM on, and that's it. They definitely want you spec'ing your RAM and storage from them at the time of purchase. For all their harping about being "green" this all just shortens the useful lifespan of their products.

I'm personally hanging onto this old MBA and another MBP because unlike anything currently offered, they have usable and reliable keyboards. Being able to easily get at the battery and SSD of the MBA is a huge bonus, though.

This is my bad and I have to walk back my hibernation comments. All the various sleep and other power mode challenges have been supported and eliminated for all systems + we have the ability to update should a future OS version make additional changes there to.

Hibernation is not presently supported on pre-2015 systems and doesn't enable. If a system that is sleeping is allowed to fully run out of power, it will be a restart event vs. resume. Short of the noted hack to the Apple EFI, this is the state of things today. This has been a discussion point with Apple for over a year and something that may be addressed by Apple in the future, but they really do not have any true motivation to do so.

That being said - we have over two years now into development of our own NVME driver solution which can solve this without the EFI change for pre-2015 models. It is a lot further reaching than just that as well. I hope to see us release this driver by late summer in beta, but there is substantial testing and qualification before we release this kind of solution. The driver also goes way beyond just the internal SSD upgrades.

I apologize for the previous incorrect information on hibernation.

MacBook models before 2015 don’t include the NVME DXE drivers so don’t support standby and hibernation with NVME unless flashing the EFI with modified firmware. How did you get around that? Thanks!

[doublepost=1555600179][/doublepost]Between posts think answered the hibernation. There are no sleep issues once so ever with the Aura Pro X or X2.

With respect to the Apple EFI / firmware / bootrom updates - We require that Apple OS 10.13 or Later has been previously installed on Mac for use of the Aura Pro X2 (and was same for Aura Pro X). There have been zero issues with Apple firmware updates pushed out post 10.13 with our NVME drive models.

Dear Larry:

Thanks again.

To #2: I was referring to Apple Firmware and bootrom updates, not SSD firmware ones (there are problems usually as well for Apple users).

You can confirm no sleep and hibernation issues with pre-2015 Apple MacBooks and iMacs?

Your answers are very much appreciated.
Magnus

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.

Thanks for the info. Any word on the hibernation issues Late 2013 rMBPs have when upgraded with NVMe drives? I've heard that this affects more drives than just OWC (I think it's an Apple bottom issue). Just wondering if OWC found a workaround?

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

There is no driver they can create to resolve the issue. It comes down to firmware and Apple isn’t going to add the support for models that don’t already have it so the only solution is to flash your ROM by yourself.

I’m disappointed OWC is not providing a disclaimer as I thought they were a reputable company.