Choosing a Compatible NVMe SSD for your macOS Boot Drive

[trs96]

I've been using this as a boot drive in Big Sur without issue but when I run the installer for Ventura it doesn't seem to detect the drive?

Are you running this with your GA-X58A system ? ATI 5870 ? If so you'll need a newer gfx card for Ventura.

Check the Adata site to see if you've got the latest firmware update. Also remember that these NVMe TRIM problems started with Monterey and carried on to Ventura too. New 1TB NVMe drives have gotten so cheap today, the easiest solution may be to just get a new drive known to be Ventura compatible. $50 for a WD SN570 is a great deal today.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09HKDQ1RN/?tag=tonymacx86com-20

 

[kirkyuk]

Are you running this with your GA-X58A system ? ATI 5870 ? If so you'll need a newer gfx card for Ventura.

Check the Adata site to see if you've got the latest firmware update. Also remember that these NVMe TRIM problems started with Monterey and carried on to Ventura too. New 1TB NVMe drives have gotten so cheap today, the easiest solution may be to just get a new drive known to be Ventura compatible. $50 for a WD SN570 is a great deal today.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09HKDQ1RN/?tag=tonymacx86com-20

I'm actually running a Gigabyte 490i Aorus Ultra ITX system with an Intel 10900k cpu. I have tried updating and saving the details of my newer build but it doesn't seem to accept the changes? System works perfectly in Big Sur. I'll look at the firmware of the NVME.

 

[oli.mathieu]

Hello,
Just to inform that I Install Ventura 13.3.1 on Corsair MP600 (NVMe) with OpenCore 0.9.2.
It has never been so fast to boot !!
EDIT
Update to 13.4 RC3
Still fast

 

[sriHacPro]

I am testing out Crucial P3 500GB M.2 NVMe drive. My motherboard is Gigabyte Z97X-udbh-bk.

I can boot from this disk with no problems.
I have tried it in the M.2 slot on the motherboard,

and using an PCIx adapter card in PCI 2.0 4x,

and PCI 3.0 16x.

In all three installations, it is booting fine.

 

[trs96]

I can boot from this disk with no problems.
I have tried it in the M.2 slot on the motherboard,

The P3 drives from Crucial can be used to boot macOS but are not recommended for use as a boot drive in a hack. Yes, you can get good benchmarks with a P3 but the long boot times are a potential problem. That has nothing to do with read/write speeds. The slow boot times don't show up right away either.

QLC Nand Flash is the main reason to avoid. Use of a Phison controller is the second. If you like Micron, the P5 is a much better choice. It is TLC based Nand Flash and has a Micron controller.

There are better choices in about the same price range for a macOS boot drive. The SN570 and 770 are both TLC based and have 5 year warranties. Most importantly they have the WD proprietary controller.

I recently bought a 1TB WD SN570 for $39.99. For use on an older Gen3 motherboard, it's got a very good chance of long term speed and reliability. The SN770 drive is a little more money but offers faster write speeds on Gen 3 motherboards.

 

[Superbogey]

The P3 drives from Crucial can be used to boot macOS but are not recommended for use as a boot drive in a hack. Yes, you can get good benchmarks with a P3 but the long boot times are a potential problem. That has nothing to do with read/write speeds. The slow boot times don't show up right away either.

QLC Nand Flash is the main reason to avoid. Use of a Phison controller is the second. If you like Micron, the P5 is a much better choice. It is TLC based Nand Flash and has a Micron controller.

View attachment 567176

There are better choices in about the same price range for a macOS boot drive. The SN570 and 770 are both TLC based and have 5 year warranties. Most importantly they have the WD proprietary controller.

I recently bought a 1TB WD SN570 for $39.99. For use on an older Gen3 motherboard, it's got a very good chance of long term speed and reliability. The SN770 drive is a little more money but offers faster write speeds on Gen 3 motherboards.

Mine's a 3-year-old 500GB SN750. Not the fastest but, then again, it's in an old Kaby Lake system so I can't really complain...

 

[c-o-pr]

3400 is close to bus-speed of 3900 and typical of PCIe3 drives so it's doing exactly what it's supposed to do, so good stuff.

Small random reads at command-queue depth 1 are always much slower than random writes because they have to come from flash locations in particular. There's no pipelining and cache is on the backfoot, whereas random writes can be pipelined and dropped in free flash as the drive sees fit, so throughput is much better.

A "translation layer" maps drive logical block addresses (the OS view of addressing) onto internally addressed flash locations and this mapper is the degree of freedom that lets random writes go faster.

 

[sriHacPro]

The P3 drives from Crucial can be used to boot macOS but are not recommended for use as a boot drive in a hack. Yes, you can get good benchmarks with a P3 but the long boot times are a potential problem. That has nothing to do with read/write speeds. The slow boot times don't show up right away either.

QLC Nand Flash is the main reason to avoid. Use of a Phison controller is the second. If you like Micron, the P5 is a much better choice. It is TLC based Nand Flash and has a Micron controller.

View attachment 567176

There are better choices in about the same price range for a macOS boot drive. The SN570 and 770 are both TLC based and have 5 year warranties. Most importantly they have the WD proprietary controller.

I recently bought a 1TB WD SN570 for $39.99. For use on an older Gen3 motherboard, it's got a very good chance of long term speed and reliability. The SN770 drive is a little more money but offers faster write speeds on Gen 3 motherboards.

Crucial P3 is cheap, and works fine, but not the best as you said. i got P3 because it is 20% cheaper than P5 and WD blue, here in India. I actually bought it as general storage, but wanted to test it as boot drive.

As for boot times, using motherboard M.2 slot, it is same as my Samsung SATA SSD. about 7 seconds from OpenCore disk selection. But, on PCIe 16x it is taking longer time, like 20 seconds. I will get one WD Blue disk and see how it works.

EDIT : I got the WD blue SN570 1TB drive. It's benchmark look like this

Two major differences between Crucial P3 and WD blue are,
1. write durability. P3 offers 220 TBW and WD blue offers 600 TBW
2. write cache.
P3 gives 3000MBps write speed for 120+ seconds( 350GB ) and then drops to 85MBps
blue gives 3000MBps write speed for 12GB, and then drops to 615 MBps.

 

[m4rk0]

Has anyone had any luck installing Ventura using an ADATA SX8200 Pro NVME drive? I've been using this as a boot drive in Big Sur without issue but when I run the installer for Ventura it doesn't seem to detect the drive?

Hi, I used to use it with Ventura and it was fine

 

[anmool]

Crucial P3 is cheap, and works fine, but not the best as you said. i got P3 because it is 20% cheaper than P5 and WD blue, here in India. I actually bought it as general storage, but wanted to test it as boot drive.

As for boot times, using motherboard M.2 slot, it is same as my Samsung SATA SSD. about 7 seconds from OpenCore disk selection. But, on PCIe 16x it is taking longer time, like 20 seconds. I will get one WD Blue disk and see how it works.

EDIT : I got the WD blue SN570 1TB drive. It's benchmark look like this
View attachment 567311
Two major differences between Crucial P3 and WD blue are,
1. write durability. P3 offers 220 TBW and WD blue offers 600 TBW
2. write cache.
P3 gives 3000MBps write speed for 120+ seconds( 350GB ) and then drops to 85MBps
blue gives 3000MBps write speed for 12GB, and then drops to 615 MBps.

I used wd Blue 250GB NVMe PCIe SSD but I couldn't get actual write speed
do you have any idea? what did I wrong? I think that should I use 1tb storage m I correct?

it is also claim for 1tb write speed 1200MBs why not get my ssd write speed 2923MBs like your SSD