MacBook Pro A1708 booting issue, SATA cable replacement?

My tip: just be sure you have the right tools; screwdrivers in particular as Apple products use some fairly uncommon screw heads. I suggest you buy a kit such as one of these: https://www.amazon.com/apple-screwdriver-set/s?k=apple+screwdriver+set

Most likely the SSD is failing. The SSDs on the MBPro 13" (2016 & 2017) non-touchbar model have an extremely high rate of failure. Most of the SSD failures will be noticed when powering on the laptop or when waking the laptop from sleep.....the SSD is taking longer to go ready which is why the laptop doesn't see a valid bootable volume. Most likely if you Option Boot the laptop, it will search for bootable volumes which may give the SSD enough time to go ready & allow you to boot without the blinking folder with question mark.

No matter what, make sure you have a good backup since the SSD can fail completely at any time.

The good news is that OWC does sell a third party SSD for this laptop. Or you can install macOS to an external USB3 SSD if you don't want to open the laptop to replace the internal SSD.

https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc/macbook-pro-13-inch-non-touch-bar/2016-2017

There are no USB adapters for this Apple proprietary SSD. Besides, it wouldn't matter since the SSD is failing.

Just a reminder for everyone, that there are a lot of new ways to permanently lose access to data on the USB-C Apple laptops (doesn't always involve a hardware failure), so it is extremely important that people always have frequent and regular backups of their computer and all external media (including the cloud) which contains important & unique data. macOS includes the Time Machine backup software for free....the user only needs to purchase a sufficiently large enough external drive (2x to 3x the size of the internal SSD) for the backup.

Hi,

I have A1708 which had a failed bluetooth chip almost 1 year after purchase. I did not asked warranty replacement at the time since Bluetooth was not too crucial for me. Later into 2.5 years it started to fail to boot from SSD. My logic board board and SSD were replaced free of charge since I have notified customer of the first issue while the device was still under warranty.

Now, after 2.5 years of using new board and SSD, machine started to do the same thing for the last month. I have send a dozen crash reports to Apple. Today it totally given up booting from internal SSD.

The problem turns out to be oxidation on the SSD connector. SSD connector needs to be cleaned gently with a soft rubber eraser on both sides. And here we go again.

Best Regards.