New to me 2019 27" Imac Fusion or SSD Upgrade

[Imac Sam]

So I just gifted a 2019 3.1Gh I5 Imac with a 2tb Fusion drive. And would have rather had a 2 tb SSD, but what can you do when it's free. So I was thinking of either cracking open the imac and install a new 2tb ssd from OWC for around $400 or getting an external enclosure off of Amazon and getting the Sabrent 2TB Rocket NVMe PCIe M.2 2280 Internal SSD 2TB for around $240 and boot thru the thunderbolt 3 port.

So of course half the cost is a good factor, but then speed is always good. Will I notice the speed difference from an external SSD to the internal SSD upgrade? I am still hesitant of opening the Imac up, even though I do have a years experience of replacing Iphone batteries and screens from a previous job, and have the viewed the OWC upgrade video.

Any suggestions or words of advice from any of you who may have already done this on your own?

 

[Nguyen Duc Hieu]

Unless you need the TB3 port for something else, I don't see the speed gain of Internal drive comparing to the external TB3 drive.
And nVME speed varies between SSD brand.

 

[Fishrrman]

I wouldn't try to pry that open, unless you're absolutely certain of your abilities to deal with what's inside.

An iMac with a 2tb fusion drive will have:
1. a 128gb SSD portion
and
2. a 2tb platter-based HDD

I'd consider "breaking apart" the fusion drive into these two component drives.
Then, I'd set up the SSD to be the boot drive.
Of course, it would have to be kept "lean and clean", but would run quite fast.

I'd use the 2tb HDD for storage of documents and large libraries, such as movies, music, pics, etc.

 

[zarmanto]

I've actually popped the case on a 2006 iMac and a 2012 iMac and had no problems during either event; for the 2012, I likewise used the OWC kit to put the case back together with a nice new 1TB SSD inside. Obviously that tells you that I don't personally have any qualms about opening the case -- but I don't think it's necessarily for everyone. So while this may not help you as much as you would like, my opinion is that it simply has to be a personal decision. If you feel confident in your abilities, I'm sure you would reap some benefits from dropping in that faster M.2 SSD.

That said: Given that you note money is one of your considerations, I suspect you could do just fine by going with a less expensive 1TB internal SSD as the boot volume, and maybe just use the existing internal 2TB HDD (not in a Fusion configuration) for your less frequently accessed data, and/or files that aren't particularly sensitive to media speed. It may be a bit on the slow side by today's standards, but that's no reason to let all that storage space go to waste if it's still functional, right?

Alternatively, you could use the existing HDD as a Time Machine backup, and maybe even pull it from the case and drop it into an external enclosure.

 

[Tdude96]

So I just gifted a 2019 3.1Gh I5 Imac with a 2tb Fusion drive. And would have rather had a 2 tb SSD, but what can you do when it's free. So I was thinking of either cracking open the imac and install a new 2tb ssd from OWC for around $400 or getting an external enclosure off of Amazon and getting the Sabrent 2TB Rocket NVMe PCIe M.2 2280 Internal SSD 2TB for around $240 and boot thru the thunderbolt 3 port.

So of course half the cost is a good factor, but then speed is always good. Will I notice the speed difference from an external SSD to the internal SSD upgrade? I am still hesitant of opening the Imac up, even though I do have a years experience of replacing Iphone batteries and screens from a previous job, and have the viewed the OWC upgrade video.

Any suggestions or words of advice from any of you who may have already done this on your own?

I bought a 2017 iMac 27" base model and upgraded its RAM early on. It really started feeling slow over the past year, so I decided to do a hard drive upgrade from fusion to SSD. After reading and watching tutorials on the internal drive upgrade process, I decided against doing an internal replacement and went with the external thunderbolt drive option.

A few months ago I picked up a 1TB OWC Envoy Pro SX NVMe M.2 External drive, installed Monterey on it, and set it as my boot drive. I'm seeing ~2000MB/s speeds off of that using TB3. The rated speed on the drive is "up to" 2847 MB/s, which I'm not achieving, but I never expected to see that in the real world. I should note, for the first couple days it was much slower (800-900 MB/s). That may be because of Spotlight indexing, FileVault encrypting, or other background processes, because after a couple days, performance improved dramatically. My only regret with the upgrade is not spending the extra $200 to get a 2TB drive. It made a huge difference for the machine's performance.

I haven't had any real problems with the configuration. I was most worried about MacOS updates, but those have been fine so far, although I haven't had to do a major version update yet. I did have a few issues with Apple Watch unlocking, but cleaning up the keychain fixed that. There may have been a conflict since it's the same machine. The only other "major" problem I've come across is that when the machine is sleeping, some background processes (like fetching iMessages) don't run normally, presumably because the drive goes to sleep and isn't woken for those tasks. So if I've been at work all day, I'll come home to a bunch of missing iMessages and it takes a few minutes for them to show up.

For now I've kept the fusion drive as it was, because I'm still worried about a major MacOS version update borking things for the external drive. Once Ventura comes out if the update is successful on the external, I'll figure out something new to do with the internal drive.