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Getting data from SSD drive on damaged MacBook Pro

I have a Macbook Pro Retina 2015 with 8GB RAM and a 1TB SSD drive I installed. The machine recently received water damage (glass of water spilling on the keyboard) and has since stopped booting. I wanted to be able to pull the hard drive to retrieve the data but I need to know what kind of enclosure or adapter I could use. I know OWC has the Envoy Pro case but this runs upwards of $100 and is not currently worth that much expense. Is there an alternative? I don't have another MacBook to throw it into temporarily.

MacBook Pro

Posted on Oct 25, 2020 2:50 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Oct 25, 2020 6:05 PM

See if you can put the damaged laptop into Target Disk Mode so you can connect it to another Mac to access the data. Even if the Mac is damaged many times it is still possible to put the Mac into Target Disk Mode (no video needs to be seen on the display either).


Otherwise the OWC Envoy Pro Enclosures are the only option of which I am aware. Sometimes OWC has listed Open Box or Used items at a substantially reduced cost.


FYI, installing the SSD into another Mac may not work unless it is the exact same model. Even if the SSD physically works macOS may have issues since it knows the SSD wasn't made for that exact Mac. I've personally experienced this while testing some Apple Retina laptops. You need to be very careful that the SSD is physically compatible with the other Mac (this can be extremely difficult to determine) since Apple has used multiple variations of the PCIe SSDs over the years.


In the future make sure to have frequent and regular backups because newer Macs do not have removable SSDs and it is much more difficult having data retrieved from the SSD (may require a professional data recovery service). Plus it is impossible to recover accidentally delete data from an SSD and SSDs can fail at any time without any warning signs.

1 reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Oct 25, 2020 6:05 PM in response to Alessandro Bovoso

See if you can put the damaged laptop into Target Disk Mode so you can connect it to another Mac to access the data. Even if the Mac is damaged many times it is still possible to put the Mac into Target Disk Mode (no video needs to be seen on the display either).


Otherwise the OWC Envoy Pro Enclosures are the only option of which I am aware. Sometimes OWC has listed Open Box or Used items at a substantially reduced cost.


FYI, installing the SSD into another Mac may not work unless it is the exact same model. Even if the SSD physically works macOS may have issues since it knows the SSD wasn't made for that exact Mac. I've personally experienced this while testing some Apple Retina laptops. You need to be very careful that the SSD is physically compatible with the other Mac (this can be extremely difficult to determine) since Apple has used multiple variations of the PCIe SSDs over the years.


In the future make sure to have frequent and regular backups because newer Macs do not have removable SSDs and it is much more difficult having data retrieved from the SSD (may require a professional data recovery service). Plus it is impossible to recover accidentally delete data from an SSD and SSDs can fail at any time without any warning signs.

Getting data from SSD drive on damaged MacBook Pro

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