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Model A1419 / EMC 3070 / Mid 2017 / 3.4, 3.5 or 3.8 GHz Core i5 or 4.2 GHz Core i7 Kaby Lake Processor (ID iMac18,3) / Retina 5K display. Refer to the older iMac Intel 27" Retina 5K Display (Late 2014 & 2015) guides as the system is very similar.

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Installing OS X on internal PCIe?

I am about to order a 1TB PCIe SSD and a 2TB SSD from OWC. My Stock 1TB Fusion drive is cloned and once I have upgraded my iMac with the new drives, booting from a usb stick with Mojave, will I be able to install Mojave on the PCIe SSD and have that as my boot drive and the 2TB SSD as a secondary data disk?

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Yes! You’ll need to run Disk Utility first to format each drive.

But before you take the system apart first break the Fusion Drive set Split Your Fusion Drive Apart

I’m not sure why you are going with a SATA SSD drive given the fact you’ve got a better PCIe blade drive, I would go with a larger (and cheaper) SSHD which will get you better performance than a HD Apple uses Seagate 3.5” FireCuda SSHD.

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Thanks for the info! I want to run the second disk as an OWC SSD 2TB due to it being silent. I’m using the iMac in my recording studio and plan on using the PCIe drive as the boot drive. However, a friend advised that running OS X off the SSD would be more than fast enough and to use the PCIe for audio recording. In that case, I would buy the 2TB SSD and up the PCIe to 2TB. What is your view on that?

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That also works! Having a larger PCIe/NVMe blade drive. But, that can be costly! The other direction is sticking with the 1 TB OWC blade drive and then using a Thunderbolt external SSD drive like Samsung X5 external TB3 drives. It also allows you to setup multiple externals for different jobs. If you tend to work concurrently on different projects. Both ways will be quiet.

As an example, I have multiple Samsung T5 external USB3 drives each setup for different clients. When not stuck inside, I'm a photographer. I use a 2013 Mac Pro for my image editing work and a 2015 15" MacBook Pro retina when in the field.

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I have a TB3 8TB, a TB2 2TB, a usb3 20TB and a usb3 4TB already

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BTW, a big thanks for info on splitting the Fusion Drive! I’ve done a lot of surfing regarding my questions and you’re the first to come up that.

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Go for it! put in the larger OWC PCIe/NVMe drive and pull the HDD out.

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