MacPro Late 2013 Internal SSD Upgrade

More of a how-to rather than a question… well one question that I’ll save for the end…

Yesterday I successfully made a bootable clone of my internal 1TB Apple SSD running Monterey 12.7 to an external 2.5” SATA SSD in a Seagate Thunderbolt 2 dock using the ”asr” and “bless” command line utilities in terminal, then partitioned an MS-DOS volume while shrinking the cloned APFS container, and used Winclone (paid app) to clone my existing internal Win11 bootcamp partition to the external SSD. Option-booting allowed me to select the macos or bootcamp cloned volumes and both booted successfully.

With that successfully tested, I was able to replace my decade-old Apple SSD, which was only getting about 450MB/s (900+ for the first 7 years or so), and clone the external clones back to the new internal SSD.

I can confirm the following gear works as a replacement for the Apple SSD in the late 2013 MacPro:

Sintech NGFF M.2 nVME SSD Adapter Card for Upgrade 2013-2015 Year Macs

Intel 670p 2 TB Solid State Drive - M.2 2280 Internal - PCI Express NVMe (PCI Express NVMe 3.0 x4)

EK Water Blocks EK-M.2 NVMe Heatsink - Nickel

The use of ASR requires knowledge and comfort with the use of terminal commands such as “sudo”, “diskutil”, and the understanding of disk partitioning, UUIDs, device identifiers, and such. Easy enough to totally screw up your system by getting one little digit wrong. Works great with sufficient care and attention.

would have liked to figure out how to use “dd” to clone the NTFS partition for Bootcamp rather than pay USD $49 for a Winclone license from twocanoes.com. Winclone worked as advertised to both make a backup image of my bootcamp partition and do a direct volume to volume clone. Easy and a worthy time saver.