Apple widening NVMe flash storage support in High Sierra possibly good news for Mac Pro, iMac Pro

Discovery that Apple has intentionally removed restrictions on NVMe in the High Sierra beta suggests that future Macs won't be limited in which mass-storage flash drives may be used, possibly including both the "modular" Mac Pro and the iMac Pro.

The improved driver was discovered by various enthusiast communities since the beta High Sierra launch, and first reported by MacObserver. As a result of the improvement, third-party NVMe drives work on compatible motherboards without a hacked driver for the first time.

At present, support for bootable NMVe drives is currently limited to the Hackintosh community as there are no official Macs with a standard NVMe drive slot. In fact, on the vast majority of the motherboards tested by the community, the driver seems to be able to connect to all manufacturers' NVMe drives.

If Apple intended to stick with a custom slot and limited drive support in the future, there would be no need to enhance the NVMe mass storage driver to support the standard slot, found on PC motherboards.

Little is known about the forthcoming "modular" Mac Pro, which was noted to not be shipping in 2017. However, during the WWDC, the iMac Pro was listed has having dual NVMe drives in a RAID configuration to boost speed. It is not clear if the drives in the iMac Pro strictly adhere to the NVMe protocol, or Apple's implementation of it — which is decidedly not standard.

As a side-effect of the driver support, owners of the 5,1 Mac Pro are also seeing support for NVMe drives with a compatible PCI-E adapter, but still cannot boot from them.

34 Comments

rotateleftbyte 12 Years · 1630 comments

About 7 years ago

My hackintosh uses a 512Gb Samsung M2 Drive and it boots really fast. This is running Sierra.
My only gripe is the lack of USB-3 support. I need to investigate that a bit more.

Mike Wuerthele 8 Years · 6906 comments

rotateleftbyte said:

My hackintosh uses a 512Gb Samsung M2 Drive and it boots really fast. This is running Sierra.
My only gripe is the lack of USB-3 support. I need to investigate that a bit more.

M.2 isn't quite NMVe. The AHCI driver is fully mature. Once upon a time, I used a M.2 adapter in a 2012 MacBook Pro Retina pretty seamlessly.

As far as USB 3 goes, you probably just need a PCI-E card with a supported chipset.

macxpress 16 Years · 5913 comments

Mike Wuerthele said:

rotateleftbyte said:

My hackintosh uses a 512Gb Samsung M2 Drive and it boots really fast. This is running Sierra.
My only gripe is the lack of USB-3 support. I need to investigate that a bit more.

M.2 isn't quite NMVe. The AHCI driver is fully mature. Once upon a time, I used a M.2 adapter in a 2012 MacBook Pro Retina pretty seamlessly.

As far as USB 3 goes, you probably just need a PCI-E card with a supported chipset.

Perhaps maybe something like this:

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/NewerTech/MXPCIE4U3/

macxpress said:

Mike Wuerthele said:

rotateleftbyte said:

My hackintosh uses a 512Gb Samsung M2 Drive and it boots really fast. This is running Sierra.
My only gripe is the lack of USB-3 support. I need to investigate that a bit more.

M.2 isn't quite NMVe. The AHCI driver is fully mature. Once upon a time, I used a M.2 adapter in a 2012 MacBook Pro Retina pretty seamlessly.

As far as USB 3 goes, you probably just need a PCI-E card with a supported chipset.

Perhaps maybe something like this:

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/NewerTech/MXPCIE4U3/

Also, this one with USB-C if you're so inclined.

tracker 19 Years · 35 comments

macxpress said:

Mike Wuerthele said:

rotateleftbyte said:

My hackintosh uses a 512Gb Samsung M2 Drive and it boots really fast. This is running Sierra.
My only gripe is the lack of USB-3 support. I need to investigate that a bit more.

M.2 isn't quite NMVe. The AHCI driver is fully mature. Once upon a time, I used a M.2 adapter in a 2012 MacBook Pro Retina pretty seamlessly.

As far as USB 3 goes, you probably just need a PCI-E card with a supported chipset.

Perhaps maybe something like this:

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/NewerTech/MXPCIE4U3/

That's Gen 1 which is the same speed as USB 3 so you are not getting the improved speed.

You would need something with at least Gen 2.