This fix is making it possible to use the native NVMe driver from apple on many machines. There is no drawback, because all modern OS (like Windows 8 and newer) support 4k sector sizes. After this step your SSD will be unreadable and must be reformatted. You'll loose all your data.
First check your firmware upgrades for your SSD. Especially if you use Toshiba drives, these have a critical "drive disappearing" bug which can happen at any time. Link
Some people reported problems with identification of a 4K formatted drive in its Dell Notebooks (looks like the disappearing bug). Recovery is possible by restarting multiple times until the disk is visible again and switching back to the 512b mode. This change will not brick your drive, but you will loose all your data after the format, even if the 4k switch was unsuccessful and reverted.
- any Samsung drive
- LiteOn CX2 series
Boot from Ubuntu 16.10 Live USB
Enable Universe repository and reload repo database
check the device for your ssd (can be /dev/nvme0, /dev/sda0 or something completly different.
open the terminal
sudo apt-get install smartmontools
sudo apt-get install nvme-cli
sudo smartctl -a /dev/nvme0
Check the output. If you have an entry with 4096, then your SSD is 4k compatible and you can use the native SSD configuration
Supported LBA Sizes (NSID 0x1)
Id Fmt Data Metadt Rel_Perf
0 + 512 0 2
1 - 4096 0 1
the setting with the + in front is the active one
You can switch the settings:
nvme format -l 1 /dev/nvme0
this will do a low level format. You need to create a new partition table afterwards from the OSX installation disk utility.
you have to remove any trace from the HackrNVMe patch from your installation drive (and obviously also from the productive used one)! With the patch enabled it will not recognize your drive anymore! Delete if exist:
- SSDT-Hackr.aml from EFI/ACPI/patched
- hackrnvmefamily kext
- hotpatches inside your config.plist (IONVMeFamily Patch#N)