Chosen Solution
Hello, I am shopping for a new SSD drive for my laptop (original capacity only 120G!). I would like to have 1 TB internal storage. I cannot find an SSD drive that will allow me to continue to run Yosemite. Everything seems to tell me High Sierra is required to make the new drives work, but I do not want to upgrade beyond Yosemite. I just want more space! Do I have any upgrade options for a simple swap? (I’m afraid if I buy the OWC Aura SSD, for instance, it will banish my 32-bit apps and/or create other headaches I don’t want/can’t fix.) Thank you in advance if anyone knows an answer to this!
You’ve got a bit of a mix of issues here! Sadly to use the OWC drive you will need to upgrade your macOS to High Sierra as Apple altered the SSD drivers so 3rd party PCIe/NVMe drives can supported as of High Sierra. OWC had their own driver before that which is now obsolete. So if you don’t want the OWC drive then your choice is getting custom Apple SSD. BeetsTech offers these drives: 768MB AHCI/PCIe 2.0 x21TB AHCI/PCIe 2.0 x4 These drives are running with the slower AHCI interface, this drive will also work but it will be running in PCIe 2.0 mode. 1TB NVMe/PCIe 3.0 x4 You then don’t need to upgrade your OS. Now let’s clarify the 32bit issue. Catalina forces this not macOS High Sierra or Mojave! So you’‘ll need to worry about that at all running either of these macOS’s. Here’s a good reference The Ultimate Guide to Apple’s Proprietary SSDs Take the time to read it. It should answer any other question you might have! You’ll still need the OWC Envoy case to hold your current Blade SSD to migrate your stuff over.
