Chosen Solution
Apple uses a PCIe x2 SSD using NVMe. The Samsung 850 EVO is a M.2 SATA SSD drive and will not work in a Mac NVMe based system. You would need a Samsung 960 EVO which offers the needed NVMe interface. But, we still have a problem! As Apple’s NVMe OS driver only supports their SSD. Now the rub! In the Beta copy of MacOS High Sierra people have reported the new NVMe driver now allows 3rd party NVMe drives to work! I my self have not tested this and Apple could pull support in the final released version of High Sierra so I wouldn’t tempt fate here until the OS is officially released this fall. Lets see if the support is still present then. Here’s a good chart explaining the architecture of SATA Express & M.2
Confused! It’s a mess! SATA Express was stillborn while you’ll find logic boards with it very few drives offer it. M.2 is a different interface but leveraged the same architecture of SATAe just in a different connector. IEEE did a better job within Ethernet’s different PHY’s. While it makes sense to have a common physical interface (M.2) and then use keys to define what the interface can support (device wise). This scheme is a failure! As the hardware & OS folks don’t abide by the rules and oddball makers of adapters have confused things even more.
The simple answer is “NO. It doesn’t work.” However, when you take a lot of things into context, the answer becomes a bit blurrier and we get to see the technical aspects of the entire question. Let’s start by saying that Apple uses their own PCIe interface which is often an 2 lane PCIe port, especially for older MacBook Pro’s. Not only is it outdated but it also comes with its own SSD and the drivers that the Mac computer runs often are only compatible with that SSD and nothing else. However, it’s been often rumored that the latest High Sierra updates have actually offered a PCIe/NVMe interface update that can actually accept third party PCIe/NVMe drives. This really hasn’t been confirmed by many people in the scene, however. So this is a thread that we have to approach carefully. Are NVMe PCIe M.2 Drives Compatiable with Macs?
I am currently in the process of installing MAC OS Mojave with help of an adapter on a 512GB Intel SSD 6. I tried the Inland 512GB (The high speed one) before this, it worked (not really), sometimes my laptop just failed to boot and was running a bit slow. Will update after a few days how this settles. I have an early 2014 Macbook Air model: A1466. I used the adapter below: https://www.ebay.com/itm/1x-PCI-E-x4-M-2…
I have an early 2015 13” Macbook Air, I got me an adapter and a Crucial P1 1TB 3D NAND NVMe PCIe M.2 SSD - CT1000P1SSD8, this one did work after I got correct adapter.
Disk utility is not detecting my SSD.. bought a 512GB Intel SSD 6 and Im using an adapter. Any useful tip to solve this problem?
Near the coloured buttons on the top left of Disk Utility is a drop down menu (View), make sure you’ve got ‘Show all devices’ selected. If you have ‘Volumes’ selected your new SSD will NOT show up as there is, as yet, no volume to show. Once you see it, you can format it and install the OS.
