There is typically a tradeoff in that lower-power states take longer to enter and wake up from, so the choice about what power states to use may differ for desktop and notebooks, and depending on which NVMe driver is in use. NVMe SSDs can support several different idle power states, and through the Autonomous Power State Transition (APST) feature the operating system can set a drive's policy for when to drop down to a lower power state. Idle power management for NVMe SSDs is far more complicated than for SATA SSDs. Our testbed, like any ordinary desktop system, cannot trigger the deepest DevSleep idle state. SATA SSDs are tested with SATA link power management disabled to measure their active idle power draw, and with it enabled for the deeper idle power consumption score and the idle wake-up latency test. The power and latency numbers are often very conservative estimates, but they are what the OS uses to determine which idle states to use and how long to wait before dropping to a deeper idle state.
Note that the above tables reflect only the information provided by the drive to the OS. The drive provides fairly conservative estimates for maximum power in its active power states – in practice, our synthetic tests didn't push it much beyond 4W. The OWC Aura Pro X2 declares support for all the usual power management features expected on a modern M.2 NVMe SSD, with two idle states that balance power savings against transition latency. Non-Operational Power State Permissive Mode Number of non-operational (idle) power states Number of operational (active) power states NVMe Power and Thermal Management Features They may also be used in locations with high ambient temperatures and poor cooling, such as tucked under a GPU on a desktop motherboard, or in a poorly-ventilated notebook. M.2 SSDs can concentrate a lot of power in a very small space. Especially under light use, the power efficiency of a SSD is determined mostly be how well it can save power when idle.įor many NVMe SSDs, the closely related matter of thermal management can also be important. Click 'Restore.'Īfter the process is complete, you should be able to restart the system and boot to your new Aura SSD.Real-world client storage workloads leave SSDs idle most of the time, so the active power measurements presented earlier in this review only account for a small part of what determines a drive's suitability for battery-powered use.
Install your new Aura SSD into the Mac Pro according to the installation manual or video.Shut down your Mac Pro, then disconnect the power cable and all peripherals.
This issue is not specific to OWC hardware. This includes upgrading from 10.12 or earlier using the App Store.
Please note that currently, it is not possible to install macOS 10.13.4 or later onto a new Aura for Mac Pro, using the standard macOS installer process.