Choosing a Compatible NVMe SSD for your macOS Boot Drive

[Superbogey]

PCIe 5.0 NVMes hitting the market soon...
Crucial T700 PCIe Gen5 NVMe M.2 SSD | Crucial.com

 

[trs96]

PCIe 5.0 NVMes hitting the market soon...

Let us know how it goes when you try one as a macOS boot drive.

 

[DrTom]

I have 3 NVMe drives from different brands with the Phison E12 controller in use with my builds and never had a problem with those.

I have an SN750 SE 1TB NVMe with the Phison controller (not by choice, the Ebay seller sent it instead of the SN750 that I ordered) but it worked perfectly in Monterey and continues to do so in Ventura with APFS and Trim enabled.

 

[trs96]

I have an SN750 SE 1TB NVMe with the Phison controller

You can keep using it. Make sure to monitor the drive health over long term usage.

Many NVMe drives will work, I'm not saying others can't be used. This thread is written to let people know which drives are the least likely to be problematic over the longer term. Those are drives with the WD proprietary controller.

To quote Dortania's article on the SSD Hall of Fame...

Since SSD compatibility usually is controller-based, picking up an SSD with a known to be compatible controller has a high compatibility chance as well.

If anyone needs a new drive for a build, going with the options mentioned in post #1 is highly recommended. We also don't know what other changes Apple will make to APFS in the future. So what works today, may not work well with future macOS versions. The perfect example is the TRIM incompatibility that began for Samsung drives mainly with the Monterey public release. They weren't having problems with macOS up until that point.

With WD drives you can be confident they'll fix firmware related problems in the future if they do come up.

 

[trs96]

the Ebay seller sent it instead of the SN750 that I ordered

You can always get your money back if the seller didn't deliver what your ordered. Did they say they couldn't get the SN750 non-SE version ?

 

[DrTom]

You can always get your money back if the seller didn't deliver what your ordered. Did they say they couldn't get the SN750 non-SE version ?

That is correct, but a little more complicated. Originally they sent me a Samsung 256GB NVMe instead of the SN750 1TB that I ordered. I sent an irate email to them and returned the drive after which I received the SN750SE 1TB. I just chalked it up to feeling lucky that I got anything at all and that I'll never use that seller again.

 

[DrTom]

You can keep using it. Make sure to monitor the drive health over long term usage.

So far it's still at 100% and has been in use since last November. I can live with that.

 

[Superbogey]

Let us know how it goes when you try one as a macOS boot drive.

How so? I thought Alder Lake and Raptor Lake builds were able to run macOS?

 

[trs96]

How so? I thought Alder Lake and Raptor Lake builds were able to run macOS?

Yes, many people here run macOS on 12th and 13th gen. NVMe drives are backwards compatible. You should be able to use it with any chipset. I'm saying that if you test one out, make sure to report back the results. Interested to hear how they work with macOS. Probably wouldn't make sense to pay the extra for one to use it with Z270/PCIe 3.0 though.

 

[Superbogey]

Yes, many people here run macOS on 12th and 13th gen. NVMe drives are backwards compatible. You should be able to use it with any chipset. I'm saying that if you test one out, make sure to report back the results. Interested to hear how they work with macOS. Probably wouldn't make sense to pay the extra for one to use it with Z270/PCIe 3.0 though.

Ahh. Hard to pick up nuance in written comments. Wanted to make sure you weren't being snarky. I would love to put together a new system that includes PCIe 5 once I save up for all the components as - like you said - it wouldn't make sense to install a PCIe 5-compliant SSD in my current Kaby Lake rig. The speed drop would be pretty bad.