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GUIDE How to Enable Unsupported NVMe Drives on macOS [Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron, Intel, LITEON, PLEXTOR]

How to Enable Unsupported NVMe Drives on macOS [Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron, Intel, LITE-ON, PLEXTOR]

This guide covers enabling unsupported NVMe Drives on macOS and is supported by both, i.e. Clover and OpenCore bootloaders. By following this guide, you'll be able to enable the unsupported NVMe Drive for booting macOS.

Overview


Since the introduction of SATA SSDs, Samsung has been highly recommended as the top brand for years and is widely used, and has stood as a number one choice for users when it comes to macOS, due to the fact delivering the highest possible Read and Write speeds in the industry and has been always a leader in the flash storage market. However, with the introduction of NVMe Drives, a few of the NVMe Controllers are not compatible with any macOS/OS X version and do not work out of the box. These SSDs are known to cause random Kernel Panics and it is not even possible to boot the macOS/OS X installer on a few certain SSDs (such as PC711, and BC711, PC601, P31 from SK Hynix) when installed in the target system. The system throws an immediate Kernel Panic before you can reach the macOS/OS X installer. In addition, performing a clean installation of macOS on these SSDs is also not possible. This situation is not only limited to Samsung, but includes other OEM brands such as SKHynix, Liteon, and PLEXTOR. Due to such an issue, it is very disappointing when it comes to Laptop and OEM users as they're enforced to either use an external drive or replace the existing drive with a recommended drive at an additional cost to have peace of mind. However, going with the drive replacement comes at the cost of additional effort of assembly and disassembly of the target system, which can be sometimes difficult for Laptop users, especially if you're a newbie.

With the efforts of the community, it is possible to use such NVMe Drives as a Data Drive and in some cases, a copy of macOS can be restored onto it and can be used as a boot drive thereafter as described in this guide. However, it is still not recommended to use these drives either as a boot drive or data drive due to the data being at risk! Please note that despite the fix, these NVMe drives can still have Kernel Panic, and macOS full updates or delta updates will likely not be processed either.


In case if you have any of such NVMe, and when you try to boot macOS, you'll get an instant Kernel Panic, before reaching the installation stage.
 
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