Besides eGPU, NVMe native support in High Sierra is a highly anticipated feature. This may not seem like much at first but for Thunderbolt 2 MacBooks (late 2013 to late 2015) that use Apple propriety PCIe SSD, this is a huge breakthrough. Instead of paying more than $1/GB for used Apple PCIe flash storage for these Macs we can now get brand new and faster NVMe M.2 drives for less money.

I found the Samsung 960 EVO NVMe M.2 drive was able to boot macOS High Sierra through the AKiTiO Node a couple months ago when I was trying to saturate the bandwidth on this eGPU enclosure. Earlier today, I installed this same NVMe drive inside a 2015 11" MacBook Air using a 12+16pin to M.2 NGFF M-Key adapter. This adapter makes the Samsung 960 EVO physically compatible with the connector on the logic board.

I was holding my breath at first boot after installing the NVMe M.2 drive. The MacBook Air was not able to boot. I could not get to the Boot Selector screen either by holding OPTION key. After an hour testing the 12+16pin to M.2 NGFF M-Key adapter through another PCIe adapter inside my Mac Pro to verify it's working, I determined it must be something with the firmware of the MacBook Air.

I proceeded to perform a clean installation of macOS High Sierra Beta 9 on the original drive so that the latest firmware for this MacBook Air can be applied. That did the trick. My mid-2015 11" MBA is now running Boot ROM version MBA71.0170.B00. I did another clean installation of 10.13b9. This time on the Samsung 960 EVO NVMe. Here's the final results.

If you have a Thunderbolt 2 Mac and it's running out of storage space, an upgrade to 512GB NVMe M.2 drive is now about $200 rather than $500 for Apple PCIe drive. With that much savings, might as well spend it on an eGPU enclosure.