Change pcie ssd from fusion drive

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Level 1

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Change pcie ssd from fusion drive

Hi everyone, I have a 2014 Mac mini with the 1tb Fusion drive upgrade. Now in 2019, the ssd part of this drive has thrown up SMART error saying failing. (I unfused the ssd and Sata drives to find out which was faulty).

is it easily possible to swap out the faulty pcie ssd with a bigger one on the open market? I will not bother with fusing them back together as there is no need these days due to affordability of SSD.

From some reading I understand that Apple use a proprietary slot so this may inhibit a quick swap. Is there an adapter or replacement ribbon I can buy to make it compatible with open market interfaces?

hope you can help as running My Mac mini solely on the sata hdd is driving me insane. Thanks in advance.

Mac mini, macOS 10.14

Posted on Oct 19, 2019 12:35 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

John Lockwood

Level 6

13,697 points

Oct 23, 2019 8:10 AM in response to bprecey

There are some resellers of Apple spare parts and via them you might be able to buy a genuine Apple SSD but you would be limited to the capacities Apple made/sold. I did go this route to convert a HD only 2014 model to a Fusion model, that is I bought and added a genuine 128GB SSD.

You are somewhat lucky yours already has an SSD as this means it already has the Apple bracket and ribbon cable. This means you could get either the OWC or Transcend mentioned by HWTech or you could get a standard M2 PCI SSD and the Sintech adapter.

If you get a standard M2 SSD avoid the Samsung NVMe Evo 970 as this apparently has Mac compatibility issues. I have used the Western Digital Black SN750 instead.

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Answer 2

HWTech

Level 9

68,618 points

Oct 19, 2019 1:36 PM in response to bprecey

The OWC Aura SSD is a drop in replacement for the original Apple SSD, but it does require the computer to be running macOS 10.13+ as it needs the newer firmware and an NVMe driver. The OWC Aura SSD is a PCIe NVMe SSD which is much faster than the original Apple PCIe SATA SSD.

I understand Transcend also makes a Mac compatible PCIe SSD, but I have no information about the quality or reliability of it.

There is a Sintech adapter to convert the proprietary Apple connector to a standard M.2 connector, but have no information on the quality or reliability of this adapter.

No matter which option you choose I highly recommend keeping the original Apple SSD just in case a later macOS update or firmware update requires an original Apple PCIe SSD to be installed. Sometimes macOS requires a working internal Apple PCIe SSD to be installed for system firmware updates or macOS upgrades (which include system firmware updates).

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