I’ve been using a MacBook for quite some time and have been very satisfied with its performance. It has 8GB of RAM, but the storage is limited to just 128GB. As I started using more software, I decided it was time to upgrade the storage on my MacBook.
The first step I took was to run a disk speed test to assess the current performance of the drive. The results weren’t particularly impressive. For this, I used Disk Speed Test, a free tool available on the Apple App Store.
Now that I was looking for the NVME type SSD’s . Here , I have realized that apple is using a proprietary type NVME SSD .
The first one is the Apple SSD and the second one is the Samsung 970 EVO NVME SSD . You can see the difference in its PIN that goes to the slot . Apple also sells their own SSD’s for the upgrades like these but they are very expesnive . A 1TB of Apple SSD might cost almost the price of a new MacBook .So there are also options to use the normal NVME SSSD’s on Macbooks by using a converter card . Sintech is a vendor supplying converter cards for apple ssds .So I have bought a Samsung 970 EVO 1TB SSD and a Sintech converter card .
As a prepration , make sure you have a proper back up on another disk in case something goes wrong . You can do it with the Time Machine backup software in your Mac.
To open your Macbook, you need P2-P5 screw drivers , you will see lot of buying options in Amazon and other online sites for these.
So I used my 1TB samsung ssd with the sintech card . It is advised to disconnect your batterry before removing the RAM . If you are looking how to open your macbook and swap the ssd , there are plenty videos in Youtube with specific instructions.
WARNING — this step voids your warranty!
Now that I have swapped the disk and powerd on my Macbook , press cmd+r and go to disk utility . If you are lucky , you should see your new nvme disk here and its straight forward from there . But unforunately , I didn’t see my new disk here .
At this stage , I am not sure why its not showing here . I was looking on some of the online forums and understands that no one has really used a 1TB size ssd for this swap . The maximum I see is 500GB and I am not sure the disk size is the reason that its not showing here . So the problem sounds like there is no partition on my new SSD and Apple’s disk utility is looking for a partitioned disk .
Disk Partitioning using Linux Mint
So I made a live Linux USB , linux mint is best for this as its really a light weight OS and I have used it on many cases . Making a live usb is a different topic now , you will see plenty tutorials online if you don’t know how to do it.
Connect the USB to the Macbook and power it on and press cmd+alt key , that will boot you to the liveusb . Once you login , go to the terminal and run a lsblk command . You will see your disk nvme0n1 here :
Now you need to partition this , we are using the fdisk utility in linux to do this :
fdisk /dev/nvme0n1This will take you to the fdisk utility and when prompted , you need to type ‘n’ which means new partition and enter
You will be asked to define the size , type of volume etc , just keep everything default by pressing enter . Then you will be prompted at the end to write and need to type ‘w’ and enter again .
Now if you do the ‘lsblk’ again, you will see the new partition under nvme0n1 and you can power off your Macbook .
Now, if you go back to the disk utility , you should see your new disk there . The above step works in most of the cases but unfortunately it didn’t work in my case . After spending some good time in troubleshooting , I understand that Apple uses a file systtem called ‘APFS’, the disk utility is looking for that type of filesystem on a disk . But in most cases , if the disk utility sees a new partitioned disk with no file system, it will let you to format that disk with APFS file systems . But for some reason , it didn’t happend in my case . So I was looking for my other options and disk cloning is an option for me . I did it a number of times for my windows machines using Linux’s ‘dd’ utility . But the problem is I need an external USB enclsoure for my new nvme ssd . So that I can connect it as a USB disk to Macbook , then boot Mac to Linux mint again and clone the two disks using ‘dd’ . I have found the nvme ssd enclosure in many online sites and bought one from a chineese online shopping site for less than 20$ .
Disk Cloning
Thats all now set with the new enclosure and before going the Linux way , I found a software for cloning specifically for Macbook – carbon copy cloner . I just downloaded this to my Mac , this is actually a paid software but you will get free 21 days trial which is more than enough to run it for one time .
This is a brilliant utility , you need to give full disk access to this software and choose the source and destination disks . This utility will auto format your new SSD with the Apples APFS file system and do the job nice and easy. You will see plenty supporting docs about how to use this software in their own website , so you won’t get stuck anywhere .
Once this is completed , shutdown your Macbook and now you need to swap the original ssd with the new 1TB nvme SSD . It then boots to new disk absolutley fine .
And I see a huge difference in performance after the upgrade and the below is my new disk speeds .
Now this Macbook works absoultely fine and running many apps and sofwares without any hiccups .