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motionfx.es

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 15, 2017
2
0
Hi everyone:

This is my first question in macrumors.

I bought last week a 2017 21.5 inches iMac: it has 8 gigs of ram and the 1 tb Fusion Drive.

I have already been talking with a AASP to upgrade the memory to 16 or 32 gb of ram and the hard drive.


But I still haven't decided how to upgrade the hard drive.

Those are the options:

  1. Removing both HD and Blade drive and place a 500gb or 1tb SATA SSD.
  2. Same as above but leaving the 32gb blade drive in place, so it will become a very fast but small SSD to store temporary files, etc. This sounds like the best option.
  3. Building a Fusion Drive out of the blade and sata SSDs. I don't know if this is going to work or if it's going to be faster than the second option.
What option you think is the best one? I suppose that the third option is maybe the worst (or maybe just impossible).

Upgrading to a blade SSD is out of question because it's really expensive (600 € a 250gb SSD).
 
The blade drives are proprietary and not replaceable, other than with Apple-original parts (which will be very expensive if they can be found at all).

Best suggestion: leave it alone for now.

If you want a faster boot drive, plug in an external SSD and use that.

Why didn't you buy more RAM in the first place?
 
Thanks for the answers, even if they don't help to make a decision about the hard drive upgrade :)

I'm not going to loose the warranty, as I'm not going to upgrade the iMac myself. It's going to be done by a Apple Authorized Service Provider: so no worries about that.

I paid 1540 € for this computer, while it's official price it's 1700 € in Spain. Upgrading to 32 gb of ram would cost me 720 € in the Apple Store, while I'll be paying less than half the price now.

The same applies to the hard drive: I know that Apple Blade drives are really expensive, that's why I said it's not an option. But I also know that a simple Sata SSD can do the job compared to the 1 tb fusion drive.
 
I did the same and did your option 3, just Fusion'ed the blade SSD and SATA SSD and it's been great. I couldn't think of a use for a tiny, very fast SSD for my use and from what I've read, with the Fusion setup it will still use the blade SSD first before the SATA one.
 
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