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joleisa
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Mini PCI-e SSD for boot?

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iMac has a Mini PCI-e slot, occupied by the wireless card that can be used for other purposes such as additional SATA ports.

This got me thinking. There are mini PCI SSDs. Can I use this slot for an SSD? Anybody know if it's been done yet?

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joleisa

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tomaszjc7
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this is a great questions... i have been trying to research this issues for a few hours now. so far i found two individuals who have said it is not possible. however, i intend to buy a mini pcie ssd card and attempt this procedure myself. (imac 24" 2.8ghz).

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FYI - Here is a link to someone who claims that their 2008 imac was able to read a mini PCIe SATA SSD: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.p...

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tomaszjc7

ah you are my hero! I will wait for your news! keep us updated

joleisa,

So it seems there are interfaces which are physically identical to mini PCIe, however, differ electronically. For example, mSata can be had in the form of a PCI Express Mini Card-like connector, however, electrically it is SATA. So, unless the mini PCIe slot in the imac is wired as mSata (which it most likely is not - working to confirm this) than plugging in a PCIe mSata SSD will be fruitless. However, there is a RunCore Mini PCI-E PATA SSD which could possibly work and possibly others... looking into it within the next few days.

tomaszjc7,

interesting info on that forum, so I guess we won't know before trying, cause he had success on 2008 iMac but not in 2010 iMac. It would nice to know also random read/write parameters of PCIe mSata SSD. I mean if on my iMac 2006 is not much better than my actual HDD (which is 75/85 if I remember right) it's not worth it

joleisa,

any news? did you try it?

joleisa,

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tomaszjc7
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yup - it didnt work. I decided to do this instead: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.p...

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joleisa
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nice! can you tell us your write/read speeds? is it like SATA I ? you can use AJA System Test from http://www.aja.com/products/software/

I like it its a nice option, but I have a broken dvd drive so I think I will replace it. I was thinking to put there a normal drive (I hope it wont be slow) and put SSD in the main drive instead of 3,5 HDD

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tomaszjc7
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Are you referring to the read/write speed of the SSD connected to the logic board SATA II port or the 1TB drive connected to the commell card SATA II port? Let me know, I'll run the tests for you.

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