Replacing the 500 GB SSD in my 13" mid-2014 MBP - upgrade to PCIe Gen 3 or 4 with adapter?

I know that I'm late on this thread, but thought I would add to the excellent advice already provided by clarifying a few points.

Most SSD failures occur due to the SSD controller failing to communicate with the computer....this type of failure can occur very suddenly with little to no warning. It is very rare in my own personal experience to see an SSD fail because it has been worn out. The few such failures of worn out SSDs were after the SSDs had written PBs of data.

For anyone considering a third party SSD upgrade....The OWC Aura SSD has the advantage having support from the vendor for use in the Mac since it was designed for a Mac. Using any standard M.2 SSD with an SSD adapter means you are not going to get any support from the M.2 SSD manufacturer and unlikely to receive support from the manufacturer of the SSD adapter....at best they will point fingers at one another. The only way to get assistance from the manufacturer of an M.2 SSD would be to reproduce the failure using standard PC or enclosure that is approved by the SSD manufacturer (you still may get finger pointing, but you are more likely to get some basic assistance). If an M.2 SSD is to be used in a Mac along with the proprietary SSD adapter, then make sure to use the Sintech SSD adapter as that is the one which is most compatible & reliable (I have never seen any complaints on this forum with it). However, not all SSDs are compatible with all hardware...only the OWC Aura has been designed for the Mac to be fully compatible & supported.

sunfish9 wrote:

So I erased the drive and did a fresh install to Big Sur. EtreCheck took 3 minutes to run and is reporting excellent performance, which is easy to see because the laptop just zips along now. Thanks for your help!

Great news!

It also looks like I need to adjust what EtreCheck considers critically low storage.

if you are rebuilding from scratch, consider NOT re-installing those anti-virus and multiple VPN stuff. They do nothing to improve the security of your already well-protected Mac running MacOS 11 or later.

sunfish9 wrote:

Thanks for this reply. I do know where the storage crunch is happening - I lent this laptop to a friend who always keeps his Dropbox fully synced to his local drive, and I'm trying to determine whether I can wipe his user account without the files being deleted everywhere.

I'm pretty sure you can safely delete the user account. Just make sure it isn't logged in. The only way to erase the files from dropbox would be to login to the account and delete them from dropbox there.

Given the computer has been out of your possession, I would recommend wiping the hard drive and reinstalling the operating system regardless. That will solve the problem.

For the longer term, I was concerned about the SDD lasting for much longer given that it's original to the machine... but since you say it looks healthy otherwise, I'll try erasing it and doing a fresh install of the OS to see if that improves performance.

I have a similar machine from 2014. The speeds reported in your EtreCheck report as the same as those reported by my 2014 computer, as long as I've had it. It's fine. That was the first post-SATA SSD model. Its speed is a little bit better (maybe 40% better) than the previous generation.

EtreCheck has three ways that it measures performance. It does a basic speed test writing and then reading some large files. Then it creates and deletes a bunch of small files and directories. (As far as the filesystem is concerned, this is pretty much the only thing the computer ever does.) And finally, EtreCheck measures how long it took to generate the report itself. Mostly what EtreCheck is doing is running more low-level Apple tools to query various aspects of the system. Some of these can take a long time to run. It is this part that is susceptible to problems from an almost-full hard drive and a variety of other system-level problems.

Those first two tests strongly suggest that the hard drive itself is performing normally. That second, overall runtime test say the system is generally running more slowly than it should. It took 22 minutes in your case. It should take about 3. You have a few 3rd party system modifications, so maybe it should run in 4 or 4.5 minutes.

Either way, if this is something you were considering taking apart anyway, erasing the hard drive can't possibly hurt. Most likely, you will get a computer running in virtually a factory-fresh condition. If you take it apart and try to replace the hard drive, if it runs at all, it will likely run much, much more slowly. There's a good chance it won't run at all and it's too thin to even be an effective doorstop.

Other than being almost 100% full, the hard drive is fine.

At 22 minutes, your EtreCheck runtime is extremely poor. Maybe that is caused by the hard drive being so full. I don't see any other clear explanation.

You can use EtreCheck's Storage tool to find out where all the storage is being used and free up 100 GB. Hopefully that will restore the normal performance.

Otherwise, replacing the hard drive will be a nightmare. But it would result in an empty hard drive. You could do that right now and erase the hard drive and reinstall the operating system. It should be fine at that point. If you can keep at least 100 GB of free storage, I expect it would be fine.

You will get far better results from just posting your EtreCheck report than trying to hack around on the hardware.