I removed my optical drive, and added a Samsung 830 SSD to my iMac. My iMac is the model before there was two SATA connectors on the logic board, so that is why I swapped out my optical drive. I was wondering if there would be a difference if overall performance if I swapped out the HD for the SSD, rather than the optical drive?
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Is there a difference if I connect SSD to optical drive SATA instead of HD SATA?
- Thread starter The.316
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I remember hearing somewhere that the dvd port is sata two and the others are sata 3, but i only knew this about the 2011 and i'm not sure if it's true. The model/year of your imac might help too though so specific information can be provided.
According to my research, your model only has sata rev 2.0, so you are limited to 3 Gbit/s I believe. But you can always go under the "about this mac" and system report and see the negotiated link speed with your SSD to be sure of your speeds since it's already connected.
Looks like the 2010 iMacs have only SATA 2: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1181806/
You won't be getting full performance out of your SSD, as the poster above said. If you want, you could get a PCIe SATA 3 card for your SSD. And if you don't use your optical drive, you could have an HDD and SSD in your machine.
Or just have one SSD going at SATA 2 speed coupled with just an HDD or ODD. I would go with SSD and HDD.
You won't be getting full performance out of your SSD, as the poster above said. If you want, you could get a PCIe SATA 3 card for your SSD. And if you don't use your optical drive, you could have an HDD and SSD in your machine.
Or just have one SSD going at SATA 2 speed coupled with just an HDD or ODD. I would go with SSD and HDD.
I have the SSD/HDD combo currently, with the iMacs original HDD used mostly for iTunes and iPhoto, and ML running off the SSD, which replaced the optical drive. I was just wondering if the two were reversed, would there be any difference.
I noticed Im not getting the full power of the SSD, because when I ran Blackmagic, I would only get about 250 mb/s. It still runs fast though. I get boot ups in less than 13 seconds, and programs open quick, I just get a few glitches sometimes, and I wondering if it had to do with the SSD in the optical drives spot. If my iMac is running for a while, I get a slight delay when using Mission Control. Or when I right click something, and go to open with, the list of options to open with is delayed.
Sounds about right for sata 2 to me.
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my crucial m4 sata 3 is like 250 write and 500 read.
The difference in SATA speeds is probably pretty negligible. I don't think it matters that you're using the one that was originally occupied by the ODD. If it ain't broke, I wouldn't go opening up your iMac again just to switch your connections.
