Remove the PCIe blade from iMac?

[Sledneck52]

I did some searching and couldn’t find any info. What I did find is people trying to create a new fusion drive using two SSDs. I have a late 2013 iMac with the fusion drive. I just installed a 1TB SSD leaving the 128gb PCIe. My read/write speeds are only around 450mbps. I just did a clone of my hard drive using disk utility and it’s formatted as Journaled which I am guessing its wrong for an SSD.
What would be the best option. Leave the PCIe and set it up as an additional drive? Raid configuration? I want the new 1TB SSD as my main boot drive, obviously I will need to format it correctly to obtain the best performance. Being that it’s formatted differently, can I still use my time machine backup to restore my computer?
Any opinions and suggestions are welcome.

Thank you.

 

[profcutter]

You have 2 interfaces inside the machine. The “blade” interface is compatible with NVME drives, using an adaptor, which can get you speeds probably into the 1000s of MB/s. The other interface is SATA. It’s going to max out at around 500 MB/s. The speed you’re reporting is normal for a SATA ssd. The only way to get the faster speeds is with a blade ssd, AHCI or NVME with an adaptor. The existing blade is not holding back your SATA ssd. Reformatting the SATA drive should not provide significant increases in performance. The modern OS’s prefer and sometimes require APFS. Is that what you’re asking?

 

[Lankyman]

You should stick with the 128 gig Apple fast storage as your boot drive and use the slow SSD as storage, or create the pair as a new FD. Either way the Apple storage is better. The format should be APFS.

 

[Sledneck52]

Right now under disk utility it’s showing the Apple SSD. It’s not mounted. Before I updated to 10.15.6 it would try and boot from that drive. It shows up as a boot option when I hold the option key, it will get half way and then I would get a white circle with a line in the middle. I would then have to shut it down, hold the option key and select the Macintosh HD as the boot drive. After I updated it to 10.15.6 it boots correctly. No need to select the option key. The Apple SSD is still showing up in disk utility but not in finder. Should I just leave well enough alone or try and utilize that storage?

 

[profcutter]

Were you able to reformat the blade drive, or does the machine still think it’s half of a fusion drive?

 

[Sledneck52]

Were you able to reformat the blade drive, or does the machine still think it’s half of a fusion drive?

I just reformatted it. Now is shows up as its own drive. What are all the "containers"?

 

[profcutter]

That’s just how the new file system arranges the formatted volumes. Now what I’d do at this point is install whatever OS you want (Mojave, Catalina, etc) on the small internal drive, called Apple SSD, and format the other drive afterwards to use as your data drive. That should maximize your disk speeds, as long as you keep the Apple drive with about 10-15% free at a minimum. So OS and apps on the small drive, everything else on your big drive.