iMac late 2013 27” ssd upgrade

[P4in]

Hello everyone,

So the HDD in my late 2013 27” iMac is driving me crazy... super slow and irritatingly noisey.

At first I thought I could get around opening it up and use a Thunderbolt SSD, but it looks like you can’t boot Windows off one without a lot of hassle. (Bootcamp is an essential part of my work flow)

Im thinking of opening the machine up and replacing the HDD with a SATA SSD. I remember around 2011 when anyone tried this the hdd fan would ramp up to max due to the change in thermal sensor being read by firmware rather than by an external sensor.

Does anyone know if that is also the case for the 2013 model? Iv tried searching but keep getting results for 2011/12.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Edit: I found my answer right after posting this. It appears there is a cable kit which can be used to get around the fan/sensor issue.

I tried to remove my thread but can’t find an option. If a moderator sees this, please feel free to delete the thread. Apologies.

 

[jerwin]

At first I thought I could get around opening it up and use a Thunderbolt SSD, but it looks like you can’t boot Windows off one without a lot of hassle

Could you elaborate? I thought that thunderbolt drives were an exception to the "can't install windows on an external drive" policy. It took a lot of work (perhaps work that could be scripted, but nonetheless, work)-to get a bootable copy of windows on my usb3 ssd.)

 

[nambuccaheadsau]

It is Microsoft that is the problem with their policy of non installation on of Windows external drives as an anti-piracy measure, please no aspersions intended.

There are work arounds. Google is your friend.

 

[Th3odor3]

I have the problem that I can't install with bootcamp using fusion drive because after I partition my drives and boot into windows install I get drive not in NTFS format. So what I did was I removed the fusion boot and made it 2 separate hdd's. 1 120GB SSD and 1 1TB SATA HDD. The SSD has my windows 10 install and SATA has my macOS High Sierra install. but not to forget I am messaging because I have the iMac 27" Late 2013 too. It's a great computer I've had for almost half a year now.