Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I have a 15" Retina MacBook Pro that was purchased new (fully loaded) in June 2014 with a 1TB SSD. According to my About This Mac screen, Apple considers this machine a "MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013)" and the bottom is stamped Model A1398. A couple months ago, a routine Disk Utility scan revealed corruption on the SSD that couldn't be repaired. I formatted the drive and reloaded macOS High Sierra 10.13.6. A few days after I did this, the factory SSD suddenly quit working completely, and I was unable to boot the machine because it couldn't find a local drive. My neighborhood Mac repair shop couldn't even get the drive to identify itself in a sled attached to another Mac, so something finally went wrong with it at the chip-level, and it failed. Unfortunately, a 1TB replacement SSD from Apple was $600 plus $100 labor, and OWC's after-market drives suffer terrible reviews about product quality and heat issues. Enter these two parts available on Amazon: the "Samsung 970 EVO 2TB - NVMe PCIe M.2 2280 SSD (MZ-V7E2T0BW)" and the "JSER 12+16pin 2014 2015 Macbook to M.2 NGFF M-Key SSD Convert Card for A1493 A1502 A1465 A1466." With these two parts, I was able to upgrade to a MUCH FASTER *2TB* SSD for about $800. That's DOUBLE the original storage space and over TRIPLE the speed of the factory Apple SSD for only about $200 more. I've been running this SSD for a few weeks now with no issues. Sleep mode works great, and everything seems to be perfect, just faster. The only thing I haven't been able to test yet is hibernate, because that only kicks in during Sleep mode when the battery gets exceedingly low, and that hasn't happened to my machine yet. If your MacBook Pro SSD has failed and you're looking at options, consider the parts I mentioned, because they represent a much better value and performance capability than Apple's factory SSD. As long as your MacBook Pro was upgraded to a recent version of High Sierra (10.13.x) or higher, your MacBook Pro will have the firmware update that is needed for this after-market SSD combination work. Check out the attached Black Magic speed results for evidence of the performance you'll get with this combo! Very happy so far, and will post back if I find any issues as time goes on. I'm 3-4 weeks in and everything has been smooth!