Recovery of personal files from internal storage of 2011 Macbook Air

[biggles]

I have a client whose 2011 Macbook Air no longer boots. It gets stuck on the white screen and the boot sound repeats. I have already tried getting help from Apple support by trying things like holding apple and R keys during boot to get into some sort of recovery mode, fails. So, the plan is to open up the Macbook Air in order to remove the internal storage. Then we can back up the personal files to a USB flash drive.

Does anyone know what type of storage device is in there? It must be some sort of SATA SSD. After removing the storage from the laptop, would the process be to put the SSD into some type of drive enclosure?

 

[pendragon1]

should just be an m.2 ssd(not nvme) like so:

toss it in a caddy and keep fingers crossed.
if this is for a "client" you should know how...

 

[BlueLineSwinger]

should just be an m.2 ssd(not nvme) like so:
View attachment 431609

toss it in a caddy and keep fingers crossed.
if this is for a "client" you should know how...

Nope, it is not an m.2 SSD. It's a proprietary physical interface, electrically it's mSATA:
https://beetstech.com/blog/apple-proprietary-ssd-ultimate-guide-to-specs-and-upgrades#hdr-6

IIRC it predates m.2 by a couple years, and Apple being Apple they just kept using non-standard connectors.

You'll need an enclosure like this to connect the MBA 2010/2011 SSD to USB. Or maybe something like this that can convert it to a standard SATA interface.

 

[pendragon1]

whoops, been a while...

 

[UnknownSouljer]

This can be done, but with only limited HDD's, because it's proprietary. OWC makes replacement drives and enclosures for the 2011 MBA, just make sure that it's the correct year/model as that also differs year to year.

Harddrives: https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc/macbook-air/2010-2011

SSD Enclosure: https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/MAU3ENVOY11/

You'll note you can buy a replacement drive and the Envoy enclosure bundled for a lower cost. Up to you in terms of what you need.

EDIT: I haven't looked into this, but I'm also sure that there are adapters you can buy for these Apple SSD's to either use them in regular enclosures, or use regular drives inside Apple laptops. But you'd have to do research.