The OWC Aura Pro X2 SSD Review: An NVMe Upgrade For Older Macs
by Billy Tallis on June 5, 2019 10:15 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here. This test is run twice, once on a freshly erased drive and once after filling the drive with sequential writes.
The average data rates for the OWC Aura Pro X2 on the Heavy test are not competitive with other current high-end NVMe drives, but at least it avoids the horrible full-drive performance we've seen from other SM2262EN drives. And it is still substantially faster than the older Apple SSD, for both full and empty drive test runs.
The 99th percentile latency problems with the Aura Pro X2 show up again on the Heavy test, but these would still be reasonable scores for a SATA SSD; it doesn't suffer like a full Intel 660p. Average latency is sub-par for what should be a high-end NVMe SSD, but is still an improvement over the older Apple drive and the current entry-level NVMe drives.
The average read and write latencies for the Aura Pro X2 are both a clear improvement over the Apple SSD but are nothing special compared to high-end M.2 NVMe SSDs.
The OWC Aura Pro X2 has competitive QoS for read operations when the Heavy test is run on an empty drive, but when full the 99th percentile read latencies degrade to entry-level NVMe performance. The 99th percentile write latencies are poor for both test runs.
The Aura Pro X2 again ends up with pretty good power efficiency, coming close to the WD Black SN750 that sets the standard to beat for high-end NVMe drives. The Apple SSD stands out with much higher energy consumption than even the most power-hungry of the modern high-end M.2 drives, and to complete the Heavy test it requires more than twice the energy that the OWC drive uses.
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Samus - Thursday, June 6, 2019 - link
I installed an Aura N 1TB SSD in a 2014 Macbook Pro just a few days ago for a customer. Went off without a hitch, booted from a Time Machine backup and did a restore without an issue. Now what to do with the old 128GB SSD that's basically useless...MamiyaOtaru - Thursday, June 6, 2019 - link
that's what the case they also sell is for. Turn it into a turbocharged thumb drive.tipoo - Friday, June 7, 2019 - link
I'd still be really curious to see a T2 mac put through these tests. Prior to it at least, Apple SSDs were good at sequential reads and writes but fell lower than the competition on 4K random and mixed loads, I'd be curious how one given such a powerful controller would do.nfriedly - Saturday, June 8, 2019 - link
I tried twice to upgrade my wife's 2014 MacBook SSD. First with an OWC drive, and second with a Samsung 970 and an adapter. The OWC one would often crash the MacBook when waking from sleep. The Samsung one would crash it while she was using it. E.g. launching a program would cause it to freeze and then reboot. I gave up and put her apple SSD back in.Oxford Guy - Friday, June 14, 2019 - link
Was it an OWC made specifically for this purpose? If so, then it should have worked.As for the Samsung, there are drives that have better reputations for Mac compatibility. Look at the link in the comments here and read that carefully.
leexgx - Monday, June 17, 2019 - link
OWC does not support the sleep states correctly they have never corrected thiswitch is stupid as the point of OWC ssds is for mac compatibility and faking official apple SSD to automatically enable trim support out of the box
Rene23 - Wednesday, June 19, 2019 - link
I would not buy such special / proprietary SSDs, and instead just go the dapper dongle route, more choice, more flexibility, ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QGO9XJY60sSandris - Saturday, June 22, 2019 - link
Just bought and install OWC Auro Pro X2 SSD for my MacBook Air 6.2 as I really trusted OWC, but find out that there are issues with sleep mode and this issue could not be solved. As per OWC technical support, the solution is to ship back OWC Aura Pro X2 SSD to OWC and cover all costs, if I do not like loose Sleep functionality of my MacBook. No disclaimers on OWC web on technical incompatibility with MacBook Air 6.2.ttot - Saturday, August 10, 2019 - link
Really wishing for a Transcend Jetdrive 850 comparison as this seems to be the only (adapter-less) competitor. Additionally, what about plate-less adapters? Are those too bulky too?jimmarz - Friday, March 27, 2020 - link
There are a lot of problems with the Aura Pro X2. I bought a computer from OWC with their drive installed. I have had nothing but problems with it and keep getting EFI Check dumps. OWC refused to acknowledge there was even a hardware issue. Even after I shipped it back to them! I wasted tens of hours troubleshooting, formatting and re-installing the OS etc. at OWC urging. Finally I sent the machine to Apple and sure enough they flagged the SSD as the problem. Spend your money on something else. There are literally hundreds of complaints on Yelp about OWC and these drives.