The OWC options still weren’t very compelling, and my next step was to see what the market for original equipment SSDs was on eBay. I knew though, that it was time to find an upgrade. I tried to make more space, by copying stuff to a server, and I succeeded well enough to have enough room to finish editing the video. I’t seems that a 15 video I was editing in iMovie resulted in the creation of lots of temp files. Then, this past week, all that space filled up almost overnight. In the meantime, I managed to keep ~40GB free on the original SSD. I gave more than idle thought to developing and selling my own adapter, since no one else was doing it.
I knew I’d outgrow the add-on card someday. I was heartened that some companies offered larger, higher-performing shortened SD cards, and that Trancend released a line of Apple upgrade SSDs to compete with OWC, but I still thought an adapter would be the best approach. OWC offered an upgrade for the original SSD, but it was relatively expensive, particularly since I replaced, rather than augmented the original storage, and it was slower than the stock option. It wasn’t exactly cheap, or fact but it was affordable, worked well enough. When I needed more storage, I decided to supplement my original SSD by fill my laptops SDXC slot with a 64GB micro SDXC in a shortened microSD-SD adapter. I’ve long hoped that someone would come out with a simple, inexpensive adapter that would allow a commodity mSATA or m.2 SSD in my Retina MacBook Pro, but I could never find any on the market. Apple has used proprietary SSD form-factors and connectors for their thin notebooks since the second generation MacBook Air was released, but they’ve always used standard storage protocols, like SATA. Long-time Retina MacBook Pro owners finally have some reasonable storage upgrade options.