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Model A1419 / EMC 2806 / Late 2014 or Mid 2015. 3.3 or 3.5 GHz Core i5 or 4.0 GHz Core i7 (ID iMac15,1); EMC 2834 late 2015 / 3.3 or 3.5 GHz Core i5 or 4.0 GHz Core i7 (iMac17,1) All with Retina 5K displays

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Can I replace the iMac SSD with the MacBook Air 2015 SSD?

Hi there!

I have an iMac (late 2015) 27" 5K, where I opted for the 256gb SSD option when I bought from Apple.

More recently, I have received a broken Macbook Air 13" Early 2015, which still has a working 512gb original SSD from Apple inside of it.

If I bung the 512gb SSD from the Macbook Air inside the iMac, will it work?!

Many thanks!

Alex

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To start with your iMac has a 2 lane PCIe blade SSD interface and your MacBook Air has a 4 lane PCIe blade SSD blade drive (interface). I would be hesitant to recommend opening your system for such major surgery with the gamble of this not working as the lane widths are different. You would be putting in a newer version of SSD into a system which may not be able to support it.

Here are images of the iMac SSD:

Here are images of the MB Air SSD:

While they look the same they may not be interchangeable.

The second issue is Apple configured your system with a Fusion drive set. By combining your traditional platter drive (HD) with your solid state drive (SSD) as one drive logically. You will need to break the Fusion drive set before you can swap out the SSD.

The third issue here is this is a bear of a system to open! If you've never opened one before you could damage the display unit which would be an expensive mistake. In addition you'll need to completely remove the logic board to gain access to the blade SSD. Here is the IFIXIT guide I would strongly recommend you review: iMac Intel 27" Retina 5K Display SSD Replacement.

OK what to do?

How about just going with an external drive, a Thunderbolt2 SSD RAID set will offer the same if not better performance on what you could do internally.

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2 Comments:

Hey Dan - thank you for your answer, the photos are especially useful.

Still kinda intrigued to see if it would work, but you're right, the guide looks like !&&*! Have you got any recommendations for a thunderbolt2 SSD raid? I mainly wanted more internal space for bootcamp, as I currently run bootcamp off a lacie thunderbolt (1, I think) hard drive, after doing a ridiculous guide to getting bootcamp to work externally, but I still find windows super slow.

Many thanks again for you answer :)

Alex

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Here is what we use:

- OWC Mercury Elite Pro Dual This one you need to add in your own drives (Thunderbolt).

- OWC ThunderBay 4 mini This one has 4 drive bays and is Thunderbolt2. I would use Samsung 850 EVO SSD drives. If your RAID them you don't want to use TRIM services.

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