In early September 2021, I popped a brand new 2TB Adata XPG SX8200 Pro into a Sintech adapter and the pair into my mid 2015 15-inch MacBook Pro (MacBookPro11,4). The tandem worked beautifully until February 25 when the Adata drive’s GUID partition became so corrupted that the drive wasn’t viewable to macOS or readable at all. Fortunately my Time Capsule had a backup less than 8 hours old.

In an interesting twist, I used the power-cycle method on the Adata SSD and was able to get it working again. My data couldn’t be recovered from the Adata SSD, but I was able to erase and re-format it as an APFS drive again. Even though Adata provided an RMA under warranty if I want to send it in, I flashed my data back to it and am using the Adata drive as-is in the Sintech adapter again. I will follow up with Adata to see if they still want to see this drive as something caused it to fail; it may be the drive is failing, the Sintech adapter is dying, or maybe even the MacBook Pro sent some unkind juice?

While the Adata SSD was briefly out of action, I popped a Samsung 970 Evo Plus 2TB into the Sintech adapter. The Samsung SSD seemed to work for about 12 hours, but the next morning the MacBook Pro was booting to the desktop and then automatically restarting on its own. The Samsung SSD was manufactured September 2021 and I tried to patch it with Samsung’s latest firmware “Samsung_SSD_970_EVO_Plus_4B2QEXM7.iso”, but this file said the Samsung’s SSD was already current. Despite this ad saying that the Samsung 970 Evo Plus 2TB is compatible if running the current firmware, I didn’t find this to be true. I also tried the Samsung SSD with another Sintech adapter I have (the stubby one for MacBook Air devices), but it didn’t work. After all this happened, I decided to return the Samsung SSD as I seemed to have the Adata device back up and running again.

Below are Blackmagic numbers with the Adata drive and this Sintech adapter. I’m pleased with the pair when they keep my data intact: