Sabrent Rocket NVMe SSDs: 2TB $230, 512GB $60, 256GB Expired

"For those who require a specific sector size to clone their existing SSDs: A newly released Sabrent utility enables users to re-format the Rocket drive and choose the sector size of their liking, either 512-bytes or 4K bytes".

This corrects the cloning issue.

I have a Sabrent Rocket 1TB I bought a couple of weeks ago. It runs similarly hot. The E12 processor is a beast but it has high thermals and uses more watts than other controller designs--and consequently more battery life on a laptop.

I bought it for a desktop but tried it in a laptop just to see what it would do--fast, but the fan ran much more often, temps were very high during benchmarking, etc. IMO, the E12-based SSDs are much better suited for desktops.





The $15 Sintech adapter allows a 2013-5 rMBPs and some MBAs to use a m.2 NVMe drive. There's an excellent wiki and 186 page thread on MacRumors (sticky at the top of the MBP forum) on how to do the upgrade, issues to watch out for, reviews of drives, etc. Read that, or at least the wiki, first.

Please note that the 13" 2015 rMBP has a PCIe 2.0 bus (~2000MB/s max) and this will not ever reach the highest rated transfer speeds of this drive (3400/3000MB/s r/w). The 15" 2015 has a PCIe 3.0 bus and it can utilize the full speeds. (Of course, the much more real-world increased mixed I/O speeds will likely still benefit a 13" machine).

Some other caveats you should consider: Battery life will be somewhat worse with any NVMe SSD as Apple's proprietary drives were very power efficient. It is double sided and fits less well with the long adapter and has worse airflow than single sided SSDs. Among NVMe drives the E12s are fast but have high thermals and draws about 2 watts more peak power than other SSDs. The fan may run more frequently, the system may be noisier, and battery life might be shorted during periods of heavy disk I/O.

I own a 2013 rMBP and successfully used the short Sintech adapter with a low power 1TB Crucial P1. It was a good upgrade for me, but the 2013s are PCIe 2.0 bus limited and have hibernate problems that the 2015 models don't, so a lower power/lower speed NVMe was particularly desirable to me.

All that said, some people on MacRumors report being very happy with their E12s (Inland Premiums or Sabrent Rockets). Read up and make your decision.

Their software lets you correct this issue now.