After looking at owc's teardown video it doesn't seem too daunting of a task for me to crack open the new iMac. Now I know that the new iMacs use the msata blade type SSD from the factory but I'm wondering if I could just replace the 2.5 spinning hard drive with say a OCZ vector or samsung 840. I guess my question is that would there be any reason for this not to work? There doesn't seem to be any temperature sensor to worry about in this iteration so there shouldn't be any problems there. Please feel free to comment!
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3rd party 2.5" SSD with iMac?
- Thread starter Zackmd1
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Well if I go for a baseline iMac and add an ocz vector drive it would only cost me $1450. (128gb of storage is plenty for my uses) If I were to go with a fusion drive I would first haft to jump to the high end model ($1500) and then add a fusion drive ($250) for a grand total of $1750... I simply don't have that kind of money. Now everyone has been taking about just adding a blade type ssd but the baseline omits the msata connector on the logic board so the only option would be to replace the spinning 2.5 drive with an ssd. I'm just wondering why no one is suggesting this unless they want to use both the hard drive and the ssd for a DIY fusion setup?
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Well it's an industry standard for apple devices. As far as I know no other company uses this ssd form factor. Any drive designed for the MacBook Air and retina MacBook pros will work with ONLY the high end iMac.
Well I know the blades use msata but I think apple limits it to their specific drives.
Only 3rd party SSD blade supplier that works with Apple's spec is OWC.
Where I am from adding a Fusion Drive will cost me about $306. While buying the OWC Aurora Pro will cost me $580 + shipping.
So either I spend $306 for 128GB NAND SSD that has been installed at the very start or go with OWC solution for double that for 3.75x storage.
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Only 3rd party SSD blade supplier that works with Apple's spec is OWC.
Where I am from adding a Fusion Drive will cost me about $306. While buying the OWC Aurora Pro will cost me $580 + shipping.
So either I spend $306 for 128GB NAND SSD that has been installed at the very start or go with OWC solution for double that for 3.75x storage.
I would go with the fusion drive. All around it would be simpler and cheaper and you do get 1tb of storage but just part ssd and part hdd. From what I have read though people can't tell the difference between fusion and a regular ssd in terms if speed.
Perhaps I can skip it all together and upgrade at a later date? Say a year from now?
It seems that Apple uses foam adhesive to attach the display/glass to the body, this stuff is easy to get, only thing here is you need to scrape of all the old stuff, but all in all it's a lot cheaper than Apple's upgrade prices.
Yea I work with this tape every day on cars so I'm pretty used to it and just like you said it's way cheaper to do then to do apples upgrade prices.
