Upgrade SSD in Mac Pro (late 2013)

The original Apple SSD drive is usually manufactured by Samsung for Apple but uses a unique Apple only connector. It does actually use the same technology as an M2 Samsung 951 AHCI SSD. (Which will not fit.)

As others mentioned, the original Apple one for the Mac Pro 2013 comes with a heatsink attached and this prevents it overheating under high usage.

Originally there were only two sources for replacing the original SSD, either buy a secondhand one some body had removed from another Mac e.g. from an iMac or a MacBook Pro 2013-2015, or buy one that someone had 'liberated' from the Chinese factory making stuff for Apple.

Note: The type of SSD that fits inside the Mac Pro 2013 typically maxes out at around 1500MBps although earlier Mac Pro 2013 units shipped with slower ones. This is slower than the very latest MacBook Pro Retina 2017 but is what the MacBook Pro Retina 2015 achieved.

Note: Only the ones from a Mac Pro 2013 come with the heatsink the iMac and MacBook Pro ones do not include this heatsink. You might get away with reusing the heatsink from your current SSD drive.

Since then as mentioned OWC have launched their own compatible range of SSD drives obviously also using Apple's proprietary connector.

A USB3.0 enclosure like this one https://www.amazon.com/Adwits-USB3-0-External-Enclosure-MACBOOK/dp/B07558BYMX/ would allow putting an Apple type SSD inside it - you could put your existing original SSD in it. However a similar enclosure for standard M2 SSD drives would be like this one Amazon.com: ELUTENG M.2 SSD to USB Adapter 2230 - 2280 NGFF to USB 3.0 Adapter SuperSpeed M2 SSD Enclosure for Samsung 8…

Note: I have deliberately not listed any USB3.1 models since the Mac Pro 2013 does not have USB3.1.

At this writing, OWC's slower drive is the only game in town for a direct upgrade.

But have you considered simply using the small SSD as a Boot drive, and moving your User account to other drives? If you were editing large Videos, you could not possibly get everything onto that Boot Drive and would be forced to organizing like in this article:

User Tip: Creating a lean, fast Boot Drive

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Hi Gemini,

Posting some extra detail in case others find it useful; I've seen this question a number of places online. It's easy to get these types of drives confused when looking at them.

The Samsung 950 / 960 series you've seen are similar looking but they're actually a different type of SSD (with a slightly different type of connector) called M.2. Both of those series also use a different data protocol than Apple's drive. The 950s are based on SATA technology and the 960s are based on NVMe, which is a new, standardized data protocol for SSDs. The Mac's drive is a custom PCIe drive (both the form factor and the connector). Some of the other Macs from 2013-2015 use a similar looking drive.

From what I see, OWC's drive is a completely different form factor that uses the same kind of connector as the OEM drive. That is likely because the main purpose of those upgrades is to increase the available capacities while attempting to keep performance in the same ballpark. I don't have any first-hand experience with them but I would do your homework before jumping into something like that. Check the reviews on Amazon and elsewhere (I believe OWC sells on Amazon).

no don't function.. I had buy the samsung 960 pro with the adapter and don't see the ssd !!! you buy the ssd similar to Mac Pro because the other ssd in the shop are a lot slowly : write 780 read 700 ... don't good !! 😀I advise you to buy one of the apple; so if you can buy one from 512 or 1 tb but its original apple, they are much faster than those around us on the web.. 😉

The late 2013 takes a different one from the Silver Tower Mac Pros. Be extremely cautious.

For top speeds, a heatsink is required, otherwise it throttles down as it heats up.

Re: USB "3.1", technically all of the USB ports on all recent Macs are USB 3.1 Gen 1. There is some mislabeling going on out there by system makers and device manufacturers where they refer to any 10Gbps USB connection with a USB-C connector as "USB 3.1" when it is actually USB 3.1 Gen 2.

Long story short "USB 3.0" and "USB 3.1 Gen 1" are the same spec given a different name. USB-IF (awesome namers that they are) decided it would be easier to do that than "USB 4.0" — as in they should've named all 10Gbps connections over USB-C USB 4.0 because 4.0 comes after 3.0. Why they didn't only they know. 🙂

That would be one option, yes. I don't know if Apple offers any options to buy larger capacity drives for that machine. Presumably they still make them because they still sell that Mac Pro (for now), but I haven't heard one way or the other if people have been able to buy drives direct from Apple.

Probably not but another option that might be worth a try is going to your local Apple Store and seeing if they can sell you a drive that's new. Similar to how if you had a drive under warranty and took it in, they'd be able to replace it with a new one if the OEM had failed. They might be able to order you a drive and you just pay their standard markup for it.

Another possibility is to upgrade the entire machine (as it were): Mac Trade-up - Apple

Yeah, I think everyone pretty much summed it up. I upgraded mine to max CPU and memory to run VMware vSphere 6.1u1 so that I could run many guest VM's all at once and totally independent of each other. I actually had this Grant guy comment on some of my threads but he didn't have a clue that the issue I was experiencing literally required me to hunt down another Mac Pro as Apple made changes to EFI and didn't bother sending their "partner" as listed any details (VMware does NOT certify any of their products work with anyone, it's the hardware vendor that does that - in this case Apple).

I found out with some research, typically in the dev forums (and not Apple's) that this was intentional and part of a security fix tied to a very serious exploit (one that is as old as the hardware itself and essentially unstoppable, other than a total revamp of the EFI).

I know you probably already moved on, however I didn't see anyone providing you what I would do. Two options, use the Thunderbolt 2 connector to an external enclosure made my several vendors. This will allow you to use either external, multiple HDD/SDD in RAID 0/1/5/10 (haven't seen RAID6 but Promise may produce that). Additionally, you could essentially get the same performance by using two of the Thunderbolt 2 to Gigabit adapters (as you are likely using both onboard adapters already but maybe not and just WiFi if on macOS) and connect them to a NAS, SAN, vSAN or xSAN (the latter is VMware and the last is Apple) using a managed switch (these are usually $100-$1000 depending on amount of ports). If you have the money or desire to have a SAN, chances are you wouldn't even be asking this question so I'll suggest the NAS. Buy one from your favorite vendor that supports as many disks as desired. For instance, WD makes several that are around $500, support four disks (enterprise grade red) and can be placed in a RAID10, giving you both redundancy and performance. There are two gigabit adapters on this and it supports iSCSI and NFS. It used to support AFP but I don't know anyone using that really anymore. It does support samba/CIFS/SMB (same thing) as normal file shares but you really need to connect to the NAS with iSCSI. This would permit Apple macOS to essentially believe it has a new disk of whatever file format you chose (except that you can access it from multiple OS's not just Apple, unless its HFS)(you cannot use this new PR stunt by Apple called APFS because it's meant for Apple OS specific and really has no practical use outside of existence on their own internal SSD drives). You can use FAT/XFAT/EXT3/EXT4/HFS/VMFS or whatever else you fancy to format the disk as.

If you are using both your onboard network adapters or decided like me to use those Thunderbolt ports, consider the Synology NAS which has four gigabit ports and then use link aggregation on them. This essentially bonds them together as one link. If you really want to get more power than any of the other options presented to you, use all four of these - use a managed switch, add link aggregation on both pairs. Depending on internal disks you added, RAID configurations and how many bonded pairs of thunderbolt adapters you used - you can easily top the transfer speeds of any of these other solutions (since the Thunderbolt interface is awesome but their external enclosures are limited to the disks once again, far less than bonded iSCSI with MPIO or standard Thunderbolt). Personally, I know lots of people prefer thunderbolt and yes, you can daisy chain storage solutions like that but with the way Apple is always forcing hardware against current owners (i.e. lighting connections for iOS that still need a USB port) or the latest shenanigans with USB-C with the new MacBook Pro and iMac Pro, you're still limited to that interface and furthermore, it's direct connect so the storage cannot be shared (unless you decide to be essentially a server sharing it)(kinda lame if you need to turn your Apple PC off - yes I said it, it is what it is and I don't care if anyone didn't like that - I equally hate them all).

So in summary, if you are going to pony up the cash for Apple high end hardware - don't permit them to corner you with only their options. Vendors across the board do this and enterprises do not like this nor tolerate it. Go with a high end network and network storage option that permits you to run, Oracle Solaris, RHEL, Microsoft Windows, VMware vSphere, Ubuntu Linux, macOS or whatever you fancy. I like the Apple hardware - I totally dislike the software, because iCloud and AppleID means less privacy for you and more money for them. I deal with Apple product security myself and they are not exactly the easiest to work with when it comes to reporting exploits, flaws and whatnot. Best wishes with your Mac Pro, let's hope that the new one this year is as overpriced and limited as their iMac Pro is.