Apple may have removed restrictions on the NVMe driver in the High Sierra beta, a move that might suggest that future Macs won’t be limited in which mass-storage flash drives may be used, possibly including both the “modular” Mac Pro and the iMac Pro.
The improved driver was first noted by the cool cats over at The Mac Observer. Through the improved driver, third-party NVMe drives could work on compatible motherboards without the need for a hacked driver.
At present, NVMe drives can only be used in assorted “Hackintosh” computers, as there are no official Macs with a standard NVMe drive slot. The beta for the new driver may resolve this issue, as on the vast majority of the motherboards tested by the community, the driver seems to be able to connect to all manufacturers’ NVMe drives.
Apple’s work on the updated driver could indicate that the company is looking to move beyond its current hardware and may adopt support for NVMe hardware, which has been found on PC motherboards for some time now.
Little is known about the forthcoming “modular” Mac Pro, which was noted to not be shipping in 2017. However, during the WWDC, the iMac Pro was listed has having dual NVMe drives in a RAID configuration to boost speed. It is not clear if the drives in the iMac Pro strictly adhere to the NVMe protocol, or Apple’s implementation of it —which is decidedly not standard.
As a side-effect of the driver support, owners of the 5,1 Mac Pro are also seeing support for NVMe drives with a compatible PCI-E adapter, but still cannot boot from them.
As always, stay tuned for additional details as they become available.
Via AppleInsider and The Mac Observer