The Small Dog Electronics service department regularly uses adapters to connect internal Apple solid state drives (SSD) to our backup and recovery hardware. Particularly the MacBook Air SSDs available since 2010. However, since the advent of the 2013 Haswell chipsets, hardware to connect the new SSD interface has been unavailable. In the past, Other World Computing has been reliable in finding solutions for replicating Apple’s interface and providing solutions to those needing to access MacBook Air and MacBook Pro Retina SSD drives. Apple has been changing the interface regularly, partly due to changing technology as drive speeds skyrocket, but this time it’s a slightly different story.
Recent efforts in standardizing low profile solid state drives has resulted in the NGFF, or Next Generation Form Factor. This standard is also called M.2. This standard prevents connections for these “gum stick” SSD drives from differing, ideally encouraging compatibility between different computer and SSD manufacturers (much as the 2.5” drive standards have been a boon for consumers and the repair industry). Within this new M.2 standard, we see SATA and PCIe (although you’ll be hard pressed finding adoption of the direct PCIe interface outside of Apple). In addition, the PCIe can run on two lanes (X2) or four (X4). There’s some compatibility confusion between these different types, although none of that currently relates to Apple’s configuration, which is what we’re covering right now.
Apple provides a PCIe SSD in the 2013 MacBook Air and MacBook Pro Retina models. It’s also the Samsung XP941, a drive that performs outstandingly fast (In MacBook Airs it’s reported it can benchmark 1.2GB/s, while the more standard version has been clocked at close to 1.8GB/s. The downside of the change Apple has made is that the new drives are using a proprietary interface for these drives, and there is no compatibility between these and the previous Apple drives, or the M.2 format. At this point the fact of the SSD being removable is likely only a slight concession toward hardware owners desiring flexibility, to allow data recovery, and keep cost down on logic boards.
Apple is moving rapidly in the SSD business (working in conjunction with Samsung), and staying at the head of the game while simultaneously keeping their products proprietary. In the future we should be seeing some incredible performance from even base model MacBook models, as far as moving data is concerned.