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A few weeks ago I upgraded my Macbook Pro Retina 13" Early 2015's SSD to a larger one from OWC: the Aura Pro X. I was pretty happy with the purchase as I was getting 40% higher writing speeds and slightly higher read speeds with the Aura Pro X vs the Apple stock one (might be due to it being almost full when tested).

However, I have noticed several issues recently. Firstly, I noticed that the mouse movement was lagging notably when connected to a certain power outlet in my university, making it unusable. More recently I noticed it overheats a lot (in 3 years I had never heard fan noises), even when it is asleep with the lid down it is notably hot.

Also while asleep, there's a red light on, that can be seen through the air vents. I'm pretty certain this red light was not visible before the upgrade, I even checked with a friend's same model Macbook Pro and we could not see any lights coming through the air vents.

I did a clean install on the new SSD (No Time Machine backup), and I have tried doing an SMC and NVRAM/PRAM reset without any luck.

I was aware of the decrease in battery life that some Aura Pro SSD customers reported , but I was not expecting this. (I have not heard back from OWC after contacting them a couple weeks ago.)

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  • I installed one of these in my Early 2015 Mac Book Pro as well and have noticed the red light. Good to know it's "normal". My issue is that if I leave my MacBook unplugged and asleep for several hours the battery will be completely dead when I try to use it. I didn't have any battery issues before changing the SSD. Now if I leave it unplugged overnight the battery is dead in the morning.
    – Mike Wheeler
    Commented Jul 22, 2018 at 5:50

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I also recently purchased an Aura Pro X and it has the red LED on as well. Got in touch with their tech support and they informed me that the LED is expected and normal per their engineers. To clarify, this LED is part of the OWC SSD itself (right next to the screw).

Kind of annoying that it's on all the time, but at least it's not a bad thing.

I haven't experienced any of your other issues, but I have yet to use my MacBook Pro extensively since installing it.

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I can’t comment yet, so I’m asking here. It might be useful to mention the OS you’re running, as Aura had (still has) issues with OS that are bellow 10.13 High Sierra.

There’s a 5-year warranty on those products, I believe, so that should be an option. Also have you tried live chatting with them? They offer this service on their Consumer Services page.

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I recently changed the original 128 Gb ssd of my Macbook Pro Early 2015 with Owc Aura Pro X 500Gb and have the same issues: the led remains always on, but the worse thing is that the battery is consumed very fast when disconnected from power line, and the temperature is higher than before.

I tried to change power save settings in High Sierra but nothing changed.

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UPDATE:

I have been in contact with OWC/MacSales support again several times on this issue. Day before yesterday they recommended the PRAM and SMC reset. I did both as instructed, then left the machine sleeping with battery power only for the night, and it showed a decrease to 53% battery life overnight. So currently there is no improvement on this problem.

Again today I had a chat with the support team, and the most recent quote from the OWC support person is that the 3 of us in our department which have the same problem should all get our batteries replaced.

From what I'm seeing, my battery life is just fine, so this does not seem to be a fix for the actual problem.

With the Apple drive installed, the machine would sleep in my backpack over the weekend or longer without any significant onboard heat being generated, and stay that way without significantly depleting the battery.

I'm currently running a test with the machine doing normal duty (connected to 2 external monitors, running email, graphics design program, parallels and Articulate Storyline, as well as google backup and sync, and Microsoft OneDrive in the background)

From the System Profiler, it shows current power drain at 1159mA, and a capacity of 5635 mAh, so battery life should be about 4-5 hours.

ORIGINAL POST:

I have recently contacted OWC Support on this issue, and their instructions per the chat I had are below. I'm interested to know if the group has a positive experience with this. Please do comment and let us all know!!

  1. Check out your System Information using: Apple Menu > About this Mac > System Report
  2. In the 'Power' portion of the hardware list, check the value for 'Standby Enabled', this is probably set to '1'.
  3. Open the Terminal app
  4. Type the following: sudo pmset -a standby 0 and press return
  5. You'll need to enter your machine password for an administrator account, then press return
  6. Quit the Terminal

I have just performed this pmset sudo command and am testing to find out whether it works.

If you want to undo this, selecting 'Restore Defaults' in the System Preferences > Energy Saver panes for Battery and Power Supply will do the trick.

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