Early 2015 macbook pro 13 ssd upgrade update#
Early 2015 macbook pro 13 ssd upgrade upgrade#
Early 2015 macbook pro 13 ssd upgrade series#

Take your time! The visible bowing from an over-tightened screw. I loosened the screw until I found a happy medium between minimal bowing, and the screw not wobbling in the hole. This may only be specific to double-sided SSDs, but it was certainly noticeable on the ADATA XPG SX8200 960GB. Note: Do not fully tighten the screw, and you will likely cause the SSD to bend in the middle. Using the longer Philips screw provided by Sintech (and not the original, shorter, T5 screw used by Apple), fix the adapter and NVMe into place. Again, the screw cutout should line up with the hole on the board. Gently push the adapter and SSD into the empty slot on the logic board.

The screw cutout should lineup nicely between the two items. Place the NVMe SSD of your choosing into the adapter.

Using a Torx T5 screwdriver, remove the screw holding the SSD in place, and pull out the original drive. The SSD is located in the top right corner (with the batteries at the вЂbottomвЂ™, or closest to you). With the bottom case off, you can now see the logic board and battery of your laptop. Credit to iFixIt for their fantastic guides and photographs. On my early 2015 13' MacBook Pro, the two 2.3mm screws were closest to the black screen hinge, where the fan exhausts are located. The last thing you want to do is try and put a 3.0mm screw into where a 2.3mm once lived, and potentially damage your machine. It is important that you track exactly where each screw came from, and that they are replaced correctly when the machine is put back together. There are 10x P5 screws (2x 2.3mm, 8x 3.0mm) to remove from the bottom case. Once it has powered down, turn it over to reveal the bottom case of the laptop. Once you have a backup & bootable USB created, go ahead and shut down your MacBook. Step 3Д¬reate a bootable macOS installer on a USB drive - We may need this to format our new SSD. If you donвЂ™t use TimeMachine, use something like вЂ SuperDuper!вЂ™ to create a copy of your macOS installation. Step 2Д®nsure you have a backup of your MacBook! If youвЂ™re using TimeMachine, manually run a backup so that you can be certain a recent copy exists.

Early 2015 macbook pro 13 ssd upgrade update#

Update your MacBook to the latest version of macOS available - This will ensure you have the latest boot ROM firmware loaded.

Conservative with power, meaning it doesnвЂ™t affect my battery life too muchДЇrom left to right: Original Apple SSD, ADATA XPG SX82000, Sintech adapter, & a SanDisk USB for scale (and to boot from) Step 1.

Early 2015 macbook pro 13 ssd upgrade series#

It ran fairly cool (the popular Samsung 970 series are known to run quite hot).

I picked the ADATA XPG SX8200 SSD after following the MacRumours thread intensively.

A P5 Pentalobe & a T5 Torx Screwdriver ( iFixIt have a great kit, but there is a budget option).

Are there any вЂgotchasвЂ™ that I need to be wary of?ДЄ huge thread on MacRumours answered almost all of these questions, as well as raising some new ones along the way, as people started experimenting with setups.

Which NVMe drive is best in terms of speed and compatibility with macOS?.

Which adapter is needed, and where can I get one from?.

Does this work on the early 2015 retina MacBook Pro?.

What followed was some late nights gathering answers to the following questions Talk of an adapter that can be used with the super-speedy NVMe SSD drives suddenly catch my eye.

Early 2015 macbook pro 13 ssd upgrade upgrade#

I believe OWC sold some upgrade kits, but they were outside of my budget.ДЇast-forward to earlier this year, and my search results change. Occasional searches every 6 months or so revealed that whilst the SSD is removable (and about the only thing that is on that machine!), any upgrades were hugely pricey due to a proprietary connection used by Apple. Whilst at home, I also have a USB dock connected which has a couple of external hard-drives connected, but again, suffer with being slow. This doubles my usable space, but is a second-class citizen of course, as itвЂ™s inherently slow.

With only 128GB of disk space, I quickly added a Transcend JetDrive Lite to the machine, which sits flush in the SD card slot on the right-hand side. Entry-level 128GB SSD, 8GB RAM it is then! As it turns out, they were just drop-shipping the standard builds, which meant any customisation (upgrading the RAM etc.) was out of the question. For those of us in the UK, it is managed by the same company that also do the Cycle To Work Scheme vouchers etc.ДЄt the time, I had a capable but old MacBook Pro (2011 I believe), so the temptation of an upgrade was too great, and I jumped at the opportunity for a shiny new retina MacBook Pro (Early 2015). ItвЂ™s early 2016, and my employer comes up with a scheme that can help us purchase a laptop and spread the cost over 12 months.