Decision/Suggestions - iMAC 2017 upgrades

[Mick101]

Hi all,

I've been going through the various threads on the upgrade options for a late 2017 27" iMAC with an i5 CPU.
Although I would love to do them all (CPU, NVME, SSD, RAM), I'm limited by some of the costs but also the level of complexity as well.

So my question is as follows:

Would upgrading the SATA HD part of the Fusion Drive (128GB SSD+1TB SATA) to an SSD SATA drive be worthwhile? How much performance gains (percentage wise) compared to upgrading the internal NVME and breaking the Fusion Drive?

Changing the NVME isn't a trivial task and if I were to undertake it, I would also change the CPU since everything is taken apart.

I already 16GB of RAM and will likely up it to 32GB.

I'm not necessarily a power user but would like to gain some performance as I do run a few Windows VMs and do some light picture editing.

So if just swapping out the SATA drive will give me the best bang for the buck, then that would be awesome. (also any suggestions for a 2TB SSD SATA drive?).

Thank you,

MH

 

[FreakinEurekan]

I'd suggest a NVMe drive in a Thunderbolt enclosure. It's slightly slower than internal but not by a lot.... and you can move it to a new machine when you're ready, easily.