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I Did a Surgery on my Macbook Air and Failed
2025 May 03
Current Mood: I'm sad!
Now Playing: Noname - gospel? (ft. $ilkMoney And Billy Woods And Stout)

Slowly recovering emotionally from my failed project of buffing up my old Macbook Air with a new 1TB SSD.

The plan had the following steps:

  1. Buy a cheaper 1TB SSD that supports my Early 2014 Macbook on eBay from a vendor with good rating.
  2. Make a bootable USB stick with the macOS High Sierra installer inside.
  3. Make one of my external SSDs a Time Machine and make a full system backup.
  4. Replace my old original 256GB SSD with the new 1TB one.
  5. Launch the bootable USB, check the new SSD state in Disk Utility, start the Time Machine backup recovery.
  6. Hooray, now we have my High Sierra system back on the new 1TB drive!
  7. Next, we make another bootable USB with the Linux Mint installer on it and make my laptop a dual-boot one.

Turned out, I got myself into a huge rabbit hole with this project, but only after I've done the first six steps. At first, everything was nice, but then I left my laptop for some time, it went into the sleep mode, and when I pressed a key to wake it up — it just crashed. And then it did it again, and again, and again. Only then I started looking up the solution and came to some very sad conclusions.

According to this extensive forum post, folks online have been spending years trying to figure out the best compatible NVMe SSDs and have compiled a considerable knowledge base on troubleshooting. So I started trying to do everything I could from this post to fix my sleep crash problem.

First of all, my SSD is a no-name, store brand one that nobody has ever logged on these forums. Both sides of it are covered with nonsense stickers, so I can't look at the chips on the board without messing up the SSD and ruining it for a potential return. That's why the Which NVMe SSDs are known to work? section ​didn't help me at all.

Second, M.2 to Apple "gumstick" adapters which DO work. This, again, didn't help me as my adapter kinda looked like Sintech (the good one), but I couldn't be sure.

Now, OS and Firmware support​. Here's when it started to look grim. I downloaded SilentKnight, and it showed me that my BootRom version is much older than the one recommended for the full NVMe support. Then I checked MacBRTool, and — no luck — it only supports Macbook Air 6,1 (mine is 6,2).

Then, in the same section, I saw a possible solution to my exact problem!

Note that macOS does not natively support full NVMe energy savings on these NVMe drives.
To get full NVMe energy saving features on macOS, you need either :

Well, OpenCore Legacy Patcher only works with newer versions of macOS, so it's a miss, but what about manually installing some KEXTs? This shouldn't be difficult?

And that's when I tried to do that with Hackintool, realised that my system blocks any unsigned KEXTs, so I went into the Recovery Mode, made an exception for those, went back, and finally installed the extensions. Pressed "Restart", and... it started crashing on system load infinitely.

That was really not great, and I had to do my Time Machine recovery once more, but this time actually twice more, because somehow it went into the sleep mode (because I went into the sleep mode — took a nap), the SSD stopped working, and my recovery failed.

Only after the second Time Machine recovery I actually decided to carefully read the GitHub pages of the aforementioned KEXTs and found out that NVMeFix works only with macOS 10.14+ (again, not my High Sierra that I'm trying so hard to keep on my laptop!), and SsdPmEnabler doesn't have my Macbook Air model in the list of confirmed working models.

So that's basically a dead end that nobody was going to solve. Unfortunately, the combination of macOS High Sierra and an Early 2014 Macbook Air seems to be the most cursed one for installing an NVMe SSD.

Now I'm back with my old 256GB SSD and I'm not sure what to do except for wait until I can afford buying a Framework Laptop 13, the webpage of which ironically slows down my laptop to a halt.


#tech club

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