2017 iMac with Fusion Drive - upgrade to external SSD?

[Tdude96]

Make of this what you will but I tried to replace my 2015 iMac's Fusion drive with an SSD using the OWC kit. I knew this would be a delicate operation so watched the video several times before even starting and went super slow and step-by-step. Got the drive in and tested it was working but the display would not turn on. Tried replacing all of the display cords one-by-one and nothing worked.

Yeah, the fear of that happening is why I went with the external solution. I watched the OWC video over and over and kept thinking "I can do that. They make it look so easy." Took awhile to talk myself out of doing the surgery and just going with an external.

 

[WilliApple]

It's not getting software updates anymore, so I would highly recommend using the iMac like a display and getting a cheap used M1 MBA with 16 GB of Ram, and however much storage you need.

To use it as a display, I would recommend a capture card.

 

[Ben J.]

It's not getting software updates anymore, so I would highly recommend using the iMac like a display and getting a cheap used M1 MBA with 16 GB of Ram, and however much storage you need.

To use it as a display, I would recommend a capture card.

You 'recommend' getting a new mac, a portable mac, and leave his imac running but just use it as a screen? The person should get a macbook in your opinion? And what the hell is a "capture card"? What's it for, and where do you put it?

 

[ignatius345]

Make of this what you will but I tried to replace my 2015 iMac's Fusion drive with an SSD using the OWC kit. I knew this would be a delicate operation so watched the video several times before even starting and went super slow and step-by-step. Got the drive in and tested it was working but the display would not turn on. Tried replacing all of the display cords one-by-one and nothing worked.

Brought the machine to the local Mac repair place who had 30+ years experience and he tried for *over a year* to fix it and could not get it working. After all that time I had to just leave it at that and say goodbye.

Thankfully my dad had an extra late 2014 iMac with a 4TB Fusion drive which is my music machine now. It is just starting to crap out on recent DAW plugins but up until recently it has been working fine. I have all my projects and audio instruments on separate SSDs which helps. I also doubled the RAM to 32GB a couple weeks ago and this has breathed new life into the machine and probably given me an extra 6–9 months.

All of this is to say, is it worth bricking your machine to do the upgrade? If it were me I would just buy a Mac Mini.

Counterpoint: I did this on my 2014 iMac 5K and ran into no issues whatsoever. Used a kit from iFixit and an SSD I got off Amazon. It's a doable operation. I'm certainly not the only one to do it, and I'm not some kind of genius -- I just followed the directions very slowly and carefully. Not saying you didn't, but clearly something went wrong or maybe there was a separate hardware failure that happened. (As a side note, I don't know what kind of Mac shop spends over a year trying to fix anything, but that might be part of your issue right there.)

In the end, I got a couple more years out of that iMac by putting a 2TB SATA SSD in place of the OEM HDD that had come with it as part of the Fusion Drive (which was then dying). I did not attempt to replace the blade SSD inside the iMac, as that's apparently much trickier to source and replace.

Running off that SATA SSD felt somewhat faster than the Fusion Drive, but not night and day. Don't forget, the whole idea of the Fusion Drive is that what you're actively working on is kept on a very speedy blade SSD, not the spinning HDD. It was a super clever hack for its time, back when SSDs were ungodly expensive. That said, the whole setup made them pretty prone to wearing out. Two points of failure, and one of them is a very tiny SSD that's getting hammered constantly with read/write cycles.

 

[17fox]

You 'recommend' getting a new mac, a portable mac, and leave his imac running but just use it as a screen? The person should get a macbook in your opinion? And what the hell is a "capture card"? What's it for, and where do you put it?

This is something weird. I guess if it was an option for OP, he would have done it already without even starting this thread.

 

[rin67630]

Option #2: get a Thunderbolt 3 M.2 enclosure and put a NVMe SSD blade in there, and you'd have r/w speeds of 1500-2500MB/s.

The problem is to find a real one.
Many advertise TB3 and provide only USB 3.2 with which the iMac is not compatible and falls back to USB 3.0.

If you buy one, immediately go to to the sytem report and check if the drive is really listed as an Thunderbolt drive.

 

[WilliApple]

You 'recommend' getting a new mac, a portable mac, and leave his imac running but just use it as a screen? The person should get a macbook in your opinion? And what the hell is a "capture card"? What's it for, and where do you put it?

The Capture Card lets any computer see an HDMI signal.

If you plug an HDMI cable in a Mac mini or MacBook Air, and plug it into a capture card, using Quicktime, you can see the screen.

They have gotten cheap lately, so you can find them for a pretty good price.

Papeaso Video Capture Card, Video Recording Card Wonderful 4K HDMI to 1080P USB C for Gaming Streaming TV Recorder, for Windows Mac OS System with USB C Adapter to Adjust PS4, Switch, Xbox1

Features : - The product complies with USB-C audio and video UVC specifications and supports - High-definition capture, strong compatibility, smooth picture without stuffer, no delay - Input terminal: HDMI/F maximum input can support 4K - Output: USB-C/M supports up to 1080P - No need for externa...

www.amazon.com

 

[judethat]

Upgraded my 2013 27” iMac with an external Samsung SSD, difference now is amazing like a new machine.