Transcend 480GB JetDrive 725 SATAIII 6Gb/s Solid State Drive Update Kit for MacBook Pro 15" with Retina Display, Mid 2012 - Early 2013 (TS480GJDM725)

Mar 2015. This is a wonderful product and if you need the space, I highly recommend it along with the other reviewers who thoroughly cover it's excellent performance, value, simplicity of installation - watch the video - and well thought out features including a nice case for your old SSD drive.Transcend has really focused on the MacBookPro market and done a fantastic job. Unfortunately, when you first investigate this drive and try to decide if it is a good choice, you will immediately read that Yosemite does not support something called TRIM on third party SSD drives like the Transcend JetDrive. This is confusing and caused me to do a lot of research.<Update Note: as of July 2015, Oskar Groth was able resolve the TRIM issue with third party drives as he explains on his website.https://www.cindori.org/safely-enable-trim-on-yosemite-and-el-capitan/ Oskar explains that new functionality from Apple made this possible. and I have downloaded his Disk Sensei application and can verify that Trim now works with no complications. Disk Sensei is also a nice application with other useful features. The text below is interesting, so even though the TRIM issue is now resolved I'm leaving it as it describes the issue and may help someone in the future if the TRIM issue returns with future Apple updates.>Top Level Summary: if you need the space, I think the TRIM issue shouldn't be a factor in your decision.TRIM is desirable, but I think you can safely buy this drive and not worry about TRIM. If you are interested in the benefits of TRIM, the rest of this note explains how to safely and simply enable TRIM periodically. The best news is that even if you want the benefits of TRIM, there is no urgency as you can always run TRIM later whenever you want to.Two quick notes that I think add to the discussion:1) Availability - it is probably wise to buy sooner rather than later because in it's most recent products, Apple is moving from SSD's with the SATA III interface to SSD's with the PCIe interface. The very specific nature of Transcend JetDrive means that it addresses a limited market: a SATA III interface SSD that will fit in a MacBookPro. The newest MacBookPro Retina now uses an SSD with a PCIe interface. As a result, if you are interested in upgrading the size of your MacBookPro SSD, it might be wise to buy this sooner rather than later, in case availability of a SATA III SSD that will fit in the MacBookPro becomes an issue as the PCIe SSD's become dominant in Apple's product line.2) As others have pointed out, TRIM is important but not critical. You can buy this drive and not worry about TRIM. However, if you want to have the benefits of TRIM, a small amount of effort makes it possible. Unfortunately, Transcend can't supply this directly, but you can do it yourself quite easily.Long discussion on TRIM below:A1. Apple uses TRIMMavericks and Yosemite continuously run TRIM on Apple supplied SSD's. However, for obvious but unwise business reasons, Apple will not run TRIM on third party SSD's. Hence to run TRIM on the JetDrive 725 will take you some additional steps. However, it is only necessary to run TRIM when you notice your SSD performance seems slow. This would likely happen only after a few months of normal use or when the drive starts to become full. In that case, with a small amount of effort, TRIM can be run as a batch process that TRIM's the entire disk. If you don't mind an occasional inconvenience, you can easily run it periodically as part of your normal usage patterns (once a month? twice a year?).A2. 960GB of Laptop Space is GreatIn my opinion, TRIM is probably not a reason to hesitate on purchasing this drive if you want the additional space. For example, if you use your MacBookPro for digital photography, a 960GB drive is extremely nice. With a Nikon D800 a "typical" photo shoot event runs me about 10 - 20 GB of raw photos before I can select out the photos that seem best. Also, I use Google Nik software filters, and because they use the lossless but horribly inefficient TIFF format, they create a 100MB copy of every one of the photos they touch.B1. TRIM is Important, Not CriticalTRIM is important but it isn't critical. Even though Mavericks and Yosemite run TRIM continuously on Apple supplied SSD's, because of the nature of the kind of problem that TRIM is designed to solve, it doesn't have to run continuously. TRIM is only necessary if you notice your SSD performance isn't as good as when you first installed it.B2. TRIM using an Alternate Boot Disk - booting off of an SDHC or SDXC Flash driveOnce TRIM is enabled, as Allan Marcus pointed out in his Mac OS X Hints post, it can be run in batch mode by Apple Disk Utility under the Repair Volume command. Note: Disk Utility cannot run TRIM without first enabling TRIM, so you have two tasks: create an alternate boot disk and then enabling TRIM on that boot disk.With a TRIM enabled Yosemite running on an inexpensive SDHC or SDXC Flash Drive, it is simple to use the normal Mac interface to occasionally (once a month? Twice a year?) run TRIM. Running TRIM periodically with Disk Utility requires an alternate boot drive, because Disk Utility unmounts the disk it is working on. It is possible to use the Apple Recovery Partition and "single user mode" to try to work around this, but it's not worth it. Keeping an inexpensive SDXC backup copy of your OS and Applications is probably a good practice anyway.B3. Copying Your OS and Applications to a Flash DriveOne way to have the benefits of TRIM is to copy your Yosemite OS and Applications to an SD card flash drive. For that purpose, I used a 128 GB flash drive and Carbon Copy Cloner. My OS and Applications would easily fit within 64GB, but I used a 128GB card because I wanted the extra space and I liked the JetDriveLite form factor.B4. Once you have a bootable flash drive - Sequence to run a batch TRIM operation0) backup your entire JetDrive. This is always a good idea because SSD's do fail. Make sure your MacBookPro is plugged into working AC power and your battery is already fully charged in case of a power outage. The steps you will follow are very benign, but backing up is always a good practice whenever you "touch" a disk.1) set your startup volume to be the MacOS you copied onto a SDHC or SDXC flash drive and reboot2) download (cindori.org Trim Enabler $10) and install ( this will install on your flash drive)3) enable TRIM using the convenient TRIM Enabler control panel,4) run Disk Utility to TRIM your drive - Open Disk Utility. Select your drive on the left pane, Click "Repair Disk."-- Is it dangerous to run Repair Disk on a healthy disk? No. Not unless you have a power interruption, so use AC power and run repair disk when your battery is fully charged.-- There are two philosophies: "don't fix what's not broken," and preventative care. Because filesystems are entirely deterministic, I think preventative care is the better choice. In principle, a Repair Disk operation can only discover inconsistencies, it cannot cause them. My experience from rotating platter HDD's includes filesystem inconsistencies ("B-trees" or mismatches in the numbers of allocated blocks) which were repaired. In at least two cases on old HDD's I needed Drive Genius to rebuild the directory table. In those cases I only lost one or two files, not the entire data set. My experience with SSD's is limited, but I have not seen those kind of errors on any SSD's I've used. I've had an Apple supplied SSD fail completely in my MacBookPro 15" Retina Early 2013, but luckily, I had a backup.-- So, unless a power interruption occurs (working AC power is important), repairing a healthy disk filesystem is a benign process.-- If you are unlucky enough to have major problems, the Repair operation may abort. If that happens, you need to switch your efforts from trying to get TRIM to run, to fixing the filesystem data on your SSD. Drive Genius is very useful in this case if you want to fix it yourself, but if not, take everything in to an Apple store or other experienced computer professional. If even Drive Genius is unsuccessful, you can always reformat your laptop SSD and restore from your backup, however in this case you may have an unreliable SSD and you might want to replace it.5) toward the end of Repair Disk processing, you will see in the log the line "Trimming unused blocks"-- if you don't see that, then TRIM wasn't enabled and you need to check the TRIM Enabler control panel again to be sure you enabled TRIM.-- also, you can check "About This Mac" / "System Report" / "SATA/SATA Express" and look for "TRIM Support"-- If you install the Transcend utility, JetDriveToolbox, be aware that it is unintentionally misleading. Even when TRIM is not enabled in the MacOS, under "DRIVE" it says "Trim Command Supported" but that refers to the SSD controller in the JetDrive - not the full OS - so you can't use that to judge the status of TRIM on your computer.6) when Repair Disk is completed, disable TRIM,-- this last step is important. you need to disable TRIM using the convenient TRIM Enabler control panel-- if you forget, it's not terrible, but you are leaving your system a little more vulnerable-- also, other users have reported in the forums a subtle result from "turning off" the Apple "signed kernel" protection. If you haven't used a clean install to put Yosemite on your computer ( I almost never use clean install), you might have old and incompatible MacOS extensions in your System folder. When Trim Enabler has enabled TRIM, it also changes a setting in the laptop nvram that tells Yosemite to ignore the "signed kernel" requirement. If you forget to disable TRIM, those old extensions will load and may cause subtle problems in other programs (like Airplay shows video but not audio). This is unlikely, but it did show up in some of the forums.7) set your JetDrive 725 as the startup volume and rebootYou are done. You can perform this sequence every now and then as a preventative measure or just wait until you think you are getting poor write performance out of your SSD.Finally, you don't have to run TRIM if you never notice your SSD performance isn't as good as when you bought it. Technically TRIM does help SSD "wear," but SSD manufacturers do not rely on TRIM for their longevity. In any event, it is absolutely not critical to run TRIM frequently, so you truly don't have to worry about TRIM unless you notice a performance problem .B5. Enabling TRIM for Third Party SSD's - ReferenceAs cited by Rich in the Amazon Q&A section, the issues surrounding third party SSD's, Yosemite, and TRIM are explained in detail on http://www.cindori.org/trim-enabler-and-yosemite/ by Oskar Groth. This is well worth reading if you are interested.B6. Enabling TRIM for Third Party SSD's - What is TRIM and its importance?TRIM is an important capability and I wish Apple's policy on third party SSD solutions did not make this a concern. However, for anyone considering the wonderful Transcend JetDrive product and concerned about the question of TRIM, as I explained above, I am convinced that it is possible to run TRIM without a major inconvenience or risk. TRIM is "not required," but because an SSD write operation requires an earlier erase, it means that over time an SSD with normal activity will start to have lots of blocks of data that have been "deleted" in the MacOS, but not erased on the SSD by the SSD controller.SSD's aren't designed around a specific filesystem, so the SSD controller isn't built to understand any of the specifics of the MacOS filesystem. Even though the allocation tables the MacOS uses to assign and de-assign (or "delete") the blocks used by a particular file are stored on the SSD, the controller itself can't read or understand the allocation tables and does not know which SSD blocks the OS has marked as "deleted" and hence, are ready to erase. That is why finding which blocks toTRIM must be an Operating System function, not an SSD controller function.Eventually, as the number of "un-erased but deleted" blocks increase, the MacOS will start to have a significant number of writes that occur on blocks that require an erase cycle first, and write performance will suffer significantly on those writes.There are interesting details in how an SSD works, and to some extent the SSD moves data around on its own for longevity purposes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_amplification). As a consequence of moving the data, the likelihood of having lots of "un-erased but deleted" blocks is reduced. For this reason, TRIM may not be as necessary, however, it is factually true that any system capable of running TRIM does - including Apple's MacBookPro implementation of SSD's in Mavericks and Yosemite.The trick is that Apple has made it "more difficult" to run TRIM on third party SSD drives in Yosemite because of a new security feature. Yosemite's default is to only boot from a "kernel" that is "signed." A "signed kernel" means that Apple can guarantee that it is more difficult for malware to corrupt the basic operating system. Whether this is a good feature or not can be debated, but it seems desirable to me as one more small step at fighting off potential attacks on your computer.It seems clear that TRIM is very useful for most people over time, and one important point is that because it is a filesystem function, it can be invoked as a batch operation using Apple's Disk Utility.B7. Example Disk Utility Log (command line - you can use the GUI)Specifically, if you enable TRIM (Trim Enabler from cindori.org is one method) and run the Apple Disk Utility and select Repair Volume, the Disk Utility will trim the unused/deleted blocks by commanding the SSD controller to erase the list of blocks it sends.Transcript of a Trim sessionThe command line below runs diskutil on the JetDrive volume labeled "myDrive" and mounted in my alternate boot Flash OS as /Volumes/myDrive. My setup is slightly more complicated as I split my jetDrive into two partitions.diskutil repairvolume /Volumes/myDriveStarted file system repair on disk0s4 myDriveRepairing file systemChecking Journaled HFS Plus volumeChecking extents overflow fileChecking catalog fileChecking multi-linked filesChecking catalog hierarchyChecking extended attributes fileChecking volume bitmapChecking volume informationTrimming unused blocks <---- this line shows that the MacOS TRIM operation has been run to tell the SSD which blocks on the volume are unused and need to be "erased"The volume Users appears to be OKFile system check exit code is 0Updating boot support partitions for the volume as requiredFinished file system repair on disk0s4 myDrive

I have been waiting to buy this, because the JetDrive 720 that I purchased would not fit my Mid 2012 15" Retina MBP. I have been corresponding with someone at transcend and although they would not provide any measurements, they assured me this unit would fit my machine.It's disappointing that the same capacity drive, that will fit my computer, is priced $100 more.It does not appear that there is any difference in the SSD between this unit and the 720 of equal capacity.Update Jul 19, 2014The 725 fits even better than stock and I am pleased to announce that when it is installed in my computer, it performs better than the SSD drive that was shipped with my Mid 2012 MBP Retina. It is also priced the same as the 720, therefore my earlier comment no longer applies. For these reasons, I have modified my rating of the product.My primary reason for purchasing this product was because my stock 256 SSD did not have sufficient space for both a bootcamp and osx partition. After juggling apps on my 60GB boot camp partition one too many times, I decided to upgrade the SSD drive. I wanted to store a few VMs that I commonly run, on the internal drive. When flying, I sometimes access an external drive and worry that the external drive will fall or the port will be damaged if my computer is bumped. With almost a TB of space, I can now store VMs and other files that would require me to connect an external drive while traveling. Since I frequently run more than one VM, it is imperative that the drive have good performance. To determine the performance of the drive, I ran several benchmarks using the Black Magic performance tool. I ran the test against all of the drives that I frequently have connected to my MBP. To reduce the chance of incompatibility issues among different hardware and port speeds, I rebooted my computer between tests, and had only one drive connected at a time. While I was testing, I made an observation related to the speed of the spinning drives. Although It's not directly related to this product, I though some of you may find it interesting. The issue only seems to present itself when connecting spinning drives, which require more power than SSD drives. When connected to an external, powered, USB 3 hub, the spinning drive performance improved by about 10% when compared to their performance while connected directly to the MBP.I enabled trim on the 725 using Trim Enabler. It is unclear if this is necessary anymore, and unclear if the changes made by the tool work. When I check the trim status using Chameleon SSD Optimizer, after enabling trip support with Trim Enabler, it does not report that trip is enabled. Each of the 3 SSD drives perform very well, with the transcend having the best performance followed closely by the stock SSD and the Samsung 840. The Samsung 840 performance is dependent on the connection, and given the fact it is connected via the GoFlex, the performance of the SSD cannot be fairly compared to the Stock and 725 drives which were installed in the same machine.Below are the test results I observed while using BlackMagic. The numbers are the first recorded read and write speed test (PAL) and not an average of all of the video codecs.Disk, Read MB/Sec., Write MB/Sec.Transcend 725 installed in MBP, 465, 440Stock 256GB SSD installed in MBP, 446, 329Transcend 725 SSD installed in External USB enclosure. 398, 387Stock 256GB SSD installed in Transcend Adapter connected directly to MBP, 386, 316Other drives for comparisonSeagate GoFlex Thunderbolt adapter with bare Samsung 840 SSD installed, 373, 318Seagate Backup Plus USB3 connected to powered 7 port Anker USB3 Hub, 82, 66Seagate Backup Plus USB3 connected directly to MBP (same Drive as above) , 72, 61WD My Passport USB3 connected to powered 7 port Anker USB3 Hub, 93, 91WD My Passport USB3 connected directly to MBP (same Drive as above), 83, 78Transcend SDXC Class 10 SD Card connected to MBP SD slot, 48, 18

I bought a Transcend 960GB JetDrive 725 SATA III SSD as an upgrade for my 2012 MacBook Pro (15" Retina Display, 512GB SATA SSD), as I had nearly managed to fill my Mac's internal storage through my hobby of digital photography (over 300GB of photos in Apple Aperture and Adobe Lightroom).The first shipment that I received from Amazon appeared to be faulty, so I contacted Transcend's UK support team via email, describing the symptoms. I received a prompt reply, recommending that I return the item to Amazon. The replacement worked without any issues at all, so I'll put the first one down to a faulty batch (or Amazon's woefully inadequate packaging - electronic devices should be shipped with decent protective padding!).The Transcend upgrade instructions are quite terse, and so I would recommend following the Transcend upgrade video video which provides helpful guidance on each of the steps. I would also recommend using a proper anti-static bench mat + earthing cable + wrist strap when performing the upgrade, to avoid damaging your precious Mac with static discharge (I bought mine from Amazon).I ran some performance benchmarks on my MacBook under OS X 10.10.5 Yosemite before the upgrade using BlackMagic, and this achieved 
358 MBytes/s Writes and 445 MBytes/s Reads (with filesystem encrypted with FileVault). After the Transcend upgrade and encrypting the file system, BlackMagic reported 420 MBytes/s Write (17% improvement) and 503 MBytes/s Read (27% improvement).I've actually kept the original 512MByte SATA SSD in the Transcend nice aluminium case, but I've kept the original OS installation as an emergency just in case), however, I haven't needed it as the Transcend memory since the upgrade.I can't comment on the use or "Trim" with the Transcend SSD, as I am not using it under OS X 10.10.5. However, there are plenty of on-line articles and discussions on Mac-related forums about using Trim with OS X and/or using Transcend Toolbox. I understand this is particularly important for OS X releases after Yosemite (NB: I am still using Yosemite because Apple Aperture is not supported on El Capitan or later!).Overall, an excellent quality upgrade.

Thoroughly satisfied customer!!I think the product is fantastic, its what my 3 1/2 year old MBP with maxed out RAM but only 250GB SSD needed. Colossal 960 GB SSD and a fantastic USB 3 enclosure for my previous hard drive.Product quality and packaging is great, the enclosure is sturdy. New SSD is faster than apple proprietary samsung hard drive. The process of swapping drives physically is straight forward and well explained. The problem I faced on 2 occasions was the inability to clone the new hard drive. For some reason OSX El Capitan (Version 10.11.3) would not let me clone the drive and there was ambiguity of enabling trim.I used a software called SUPERDUPER ( not kidding) to clone my SSD and then performed the straight forward swap.SSD is not cheap, but I was willing to pay to max out my MBP internal storage capacity.Very happy indeed.

The drive is very easy to install : unscrew the bottom cover, lift the battery plug, unscrew the old drive, put in the jetdrive, put back screws, battery and cover and you have finished. However the drive itself is not faster (nor slower) than the old unit.EDIT : After three months using it the performances decreased drastically. Softwares such as photoshop, indesign and illustrator all run slower, take more time to load and often freeze.Currently I am looking forward to reinstall my original drive and sell this one.

My Mid 2013 MBPr had the 512gb SSD drive fitted, it's served well but more space is required and the Transcend JetDrive 725 looked ideal. Once unboxed, the quick guide read, and got on with the job. Overall very easy although I did rely on iFixit.com to provide some of the detail. In use it is fast, the Apple drive achieved an impressive 411.6 MB/s write and 452 MB/s read, the JetDrive writes at 436 and reads at 496, an impressive improvement. Now a total available space of 960GB plus the USB3 connected old drive of 512GB in a very portable form, should prove enough for some time to come. Would I recommend - definitely.

Everything I needed to walk through the process, almost as if handheld each step of the way. Highly recommend. Kit includes the tools you need, the cables, and instructions, through I also watched video on Transcend's website which I personally found prepared me much better than reading about what to do.Do not let yourself be daunted, if you are contemplating doing this, then I highly encourage you, just make sure you match up you identify exactly the module you need (i.e. know your model and year of manufacture).