Late 2013 imac - upgrade pci-e

[Rubberman]

I have a late 2013 imac 21.5” that I have upgrade to 16gb ram. It has the Fusion drive. Would it help on speed to upgrade the PCIe ssd to a newer faster one? Has anyone done this ?

 

[Jack Neill]

I have a late 2013 imac 21.5” that I have upgrade to 16gb ram. It has the Fusion drive. Would it help on speed to upgrade the PCIe ssd to a newer faster one? Has anyone done this ?

I have not performed a 2013 upgrade, but the answer is yes. Moving away from anything platter based will always be faster. I have a 2011 with TB1 and boot off NVMe via a TB3 enclosure. The R/W speeds are roughly 4x faster than the platter inside and I didn't have to take it apart, although that isn't that difficult in a 2011 a 2013 looks a bit more difficult.

 

[Rubberman]

I have not performed a 2013 upgrade, but the answer is yes. Moving away from anything platter based will always be faster. I have a 2011 with TB1 and boot off NVMe via a TB3 enclosure. The R/W speeds are roughly 4x faster than the platter inside and I didn't have to take it apart, although that isn't that difficult in a 2011 a 2013 looks a bit more difficult.

Im not saying upgrading the 1TB platter hard drive to a SSD. im saying to upgrade the pci-e nvme sdd to a newer one.

 

[Jack Neill]

I would still say yes, in the few machines I have gone the adapter and NVMe route I have gotten better speeds than Apples SSD's.

 

[Rubberman]

I think in the late 2013 iMac the pcie port is gen2. Will gen3 nvme work?

 

[Jack Neill]

Probably but you won't get gen 3 speeds.

 

[Rubberman]

Probably but you won't get gen 3 speeds.

would I need to copy the files from the pcie ssd over to the new nvme ssd? aren't there boot files on it?

 

[Jack Neill]

Yeah, I would use Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperSuper to clone your existing install or install fresh and use a TM backup to restore your stuff.