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MacBook Air 2013 freezes after SSD upgrade to Samsung XP941

Hi all,

I have some problem with my MacBook Air 13" 2013.

I have upgraded it with Samsung XP941 using an adapter.

But after some time I started experiencing system freezes after putting computer into sleep. When I close the screen lid, and open it again after some time, when the computer is supposed to wake up the OS is frozen, sometimes i can move coursor, sometimes not. It is like clicking on a screenshot of previously open app windows.

Is there any way to make it work?

Many thanks

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Using an M2 stick with adapter just does not work well in Macs. Send it back and either go with an Apple original or the OWC sticks that are actually built for Macs.

The guide lists sticks that will work:

MacBook Air 13" Mid 2013 Solid-State Drive Replacement

https://eshop.macsales.com/upgrades/macb...

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@mayer - I have a feeling we'll be seeing more people coming out of the woodwork with problems using these adapters and M.2 drives when they upgrade to High Sierra with the new file system it offers.

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@danj - Do you believe the problems might come from the adapters ?

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Its possible the adapters are also a factor here. The problem is there are just too many and no one is qualifying them.

When we tested the setup using one adapter and tried three different SSD's two failed quite frequently and the third also failed as well but it didn't fail in the same way. So The SSD make & model is a factor here as well, likely in the SSD's timing and what it does during its clean up operations (Garbage & TRIM).

This is too big a matrix for anyone to test (carrier, SSD & system) without Apple being part of the testing (which they won't do). So the bottomline here its too risky!

You also have another shoe ready to fall, Apple is about to introduce a new file system in High Sierra which could make a mess.

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Good to know, as this seems a very highly unreliable replacement, 3 out of 3 means recipe for sure trouble one day or the other. I'll keep away from these, thanks for the info !

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Hi Guys, thanks for all of your answers.

@danj I also suspect this might be connector. I have tried to switch on and off the TRIM as well as kext integrity mode.

Interestingly the same set-up (exactly the same ssd stick and adapter) are working just fine in the macbook pro retina 13" 2013. is it possible that this might be related to (just my guess, i know it sounds a bit silly) different compound of metals in touching parts?

I am quite clueless now.

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Are you running on Sierra?

Most of the machines I've had around from Core 2 Duo White MacBook, to MacBook Pros i7 quad core showed the same glitch one or another time.

Update (06/21/2017)

Actually I could have made myself clearer as my findings in relation with this Sierra problems are not strictly related to the use of a Ssd as drive. I found it spreaded all around with a wide number of machines mainly manufatured in 2010/2012 time frame, including Macbooks a1342 and Pros a1286/a1297 with all kinds of processors. Wake from stop would make the machines unresponsive for a good half minute, after which everything went back to normal. Given the wide range of different models i concluded it was a Sierra glitch, or at least of the 10.12.3 I was using as installer. Just updated to 10.12.5 and I'll keep an eye on it to see if it's solved.

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This is a different type of SSD. You're talking about a 2.5" SATA SSD. Here we are talking about a M.2 blade SSD in this case a Samsung XP941 512GB AHCI SSD then using a special carrier to convert the M.2 pinouts to match up with Apple's custom layout.

But the rub here is the signaling Apple is expecting within the system is not quite the same as what the M.2 standard SSD offer. Sadly, its just on the edge so people think it works but it really doesn't. Once the system is under stress the M.2 SSD will fail.

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As to your own problems, you could have hit two here:

The first is the systems SATA port speed. As an example the older MacBook's had either a SATA I (1.5 Gb/s) or a SATA II (3.0 Gb/s) SATA port so the SSD you got many not offer support for the systems SATA speed (review the drives spec sheet).

The other issue you can face here is the HD SATA cable in the MacBook Pro's have a tendency to wear-out and some need a newer version of cable. You also could have a slower SATA II port in the older models.

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@arbaman - mmm... We just did a big roll out of Sierra (over 200 systems so far). We did a lot of testing before we jumped and haven't seen to many issues. What we are seeing is hardware problems in our field laptops: HD's which needed replacing (3 so far, they were on their last legs any ways). The two SSD systems needed a new SATA cable and refresh format. None of the desktops had issues.

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Tristan will be eternally grateful.
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