Chosen Solution
Hello Mac Guru’s (talking to you @mayer, @danj, @reecee)! I have another MacBook Air A1466, this one an early 2015. The SSD appears to be dead. When I try to boot, I either get the flashing question mark or if it does start the boot process, it fails when the white bar is completely filled in. I did boot into recovery options, and ran the First Aid. It found “corruption” but when I clicked Done, the MBA just shutdown. So I installed an SSD from a 2014 (the one you guys helped me fix!) and it booted properly so the issue is definitely with the SSD. I have been looking for replacement drives but they are expensive (OWC) or not available/not in stock (PowerBookMedic, Crucial, BeetsTech). So my question is; are there other suppliers or can I install a 2014 version? My understanding is that it will work but be “slower” (PCIe 2.0 x2 vs. PCIe 2.0 x4).
Before you condemn the drive, let’s see if we can FIX IT! Hook up an external USB boot drive ( I use the Envoy enclosures with the old SSDs from upgrades - have all my system and programs upgrades on them: one boots into Sierra and one to El Capitan) (when a customer wants a SSD upgrade I pick the option of the one with the enclosure and get the drive on the cheap). So you’re booted from the external. Run Disk Utilities and do a format with the “write zeros” option. If it works, it has now maps out anything it can’t write to. Now do a system installation from the external.
To answer your question, 2013-2014 Retina/Air SSDs are compatible with 2013-2015 models. There is a speed difference, but it is not noticeable at all and not worth worrying about to be honest. For future reference, I’m pretty sure I’ve tried 2015 SSDs on the 2013-2014 models and they work fine also.
