Hey!
I'm thinking about getting the 2017 iMac, but something's confusing me. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like there's still a SATA connection for the HDD portion of the fusion drives. Is there something wrong with replacing that with an SSD? If it's just a SATA connector, my first thought is that you could pop an SSD on there and call it a day.
Let me know if anyone has any experience with this!
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Apple has two drive connections in this series: One is SATA which is supporting the traditional spinning disk HD. The second drive connection is a custom PCIe x4 that supports a custom blade SSD.
The issue you need to think through is if SATA III (6.0 Gb/s) SATA connection is fast enough for you. Vs the much higher PCIe SSD connection x2 (16.8 Gb/s) x4 (28 Gb/s) offers.
A Fusion Drive is a dual drive setup (both drives) which are seen as one logical drive. You can break the fusion set to get access to the discreet drives. And yes you could swap out your SATA HD for a SSD but you can't use two SSD's in a fusion drive setup.
I recommend getting the largest PCIe SSD model you can afford and then later either add a SATA drive or better yet setup an external Thunderbolt RAID drive so you gain the better performance of the RAID set.
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If it has enough room for an SSD, then yes. Apple tends to try to use as little space as possible, so a SSD that is the size of a 2.5 HDD might not fit.
Good Luck!
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