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BLUF: Can I use the SSD out of a MacBook Air in a MacBook Pro 13?

I have a road worn but otherwise fine MacBook Pro 13"/Early 2013. About a year ago it started having issues with crashes and hangs. I reformatted its drive and reinstalled macOS, which worked for a little while. But now that machine will not fully POST. It will boot, but almost immediately indicates that it can't find a startup disk. That indicates an SSD failure to me.

I happen to have an Air, but I'd rather have the Pro up and running——so can I swap out the drives? Both were running identical versions of Mojave.

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  • What model of MacBook Air?
    – nekomatic
    Commented Aug 20, 2019 at 14:12
  • It's a late 2015. I opened both up, and the Pro has that plastic chassis the SSD fits into, while the Air does not. Don't know if I can just pull the SSD from the Air out, mount it in the Pro chassis and button it back up or not.
    – nickmjones
    Commented Aug 21, 2019 at 16:22
  • Sorry, I completely missed that you already gave the model in the question title!
    – nekomatic
    Commented Aug 22, 2019 at 9:45

2 Answers 2

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Have you tried reverting to the original macOS that was shipped with this system? If you can reproduce the same behavior with Mavericks/Yosemite then you could very well confirm that this behavior is rooted in an SSD failure vs file system issue.

This blog post lists a number of issues as to why Mojave cannot find your hard disk, I would perform a systematic check before trying to swap out the hard disk.

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    Good idea, and I did try but Disk Utility still just won't see the SSD at all—which leads me to believe it's just fried.
    – nickmjones
    Commented Aug 21, 2019 at 16:23
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According to the information on everymac.com, the Early 2015 MacBook Air has a PCIe SSD while the Early 2013 MacBook Pro uses an SSD with a SATA interface. The everymac.com page implies that the Pro's SSD can be replaced with a 2.5in drive up to 7 mm thick.

This ought to mean that you could either look for a PCIe to SATA adapter to use the drive from the Air, or fit a standard 2.5in SATA SSD. However the Pro's SSD cable is not a standard SATA one so you would need a specific cable or adapter to do this and without spending too long on it I can't find any sign of one online.

If you don't mind booting the Pro off an external drive then you might be able to find an external USB housing to let you use the Air's SSD... but in that case you might as well just get an external USB SSD which lets you keep the Air in working order. If you really want the Pro working with an internal SSD then it looks like you'll have to spend the money on an SSD replacement for that model.

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