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Upgrade to SSD on a 2017 iMac 27"

mikehalloran said:
If you replace both the blade and the HDD on a 2013–2014, YOU DO need the OWC temp sensor.
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Are you sure because I have no blade drive (the blade slot is empty) and only replaced the original HDD with a SSD.
So is the need for an OWC temperature sensor when both the blade and the HDD are replaced on a fusion model, and on a HDD-only model no sensor is ever needed?
 
dobrink said:
Are you sure because I have no blade drive (the blade slot is empty) and only replaced the original HDD with a SSD.
So is the need for an OWC temperature sensor when both the blade and the HDD are replaced on a fusion model, and on a HDD-only model no sensor is ever needed?
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I only know from my experience. If you do this and the fans don't go nuts, then that is great.
 
dobrink said:
I am going to be using ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro which is less power hungry and cooler than your Samsung 970 Evo. In the iMac there is nothing directly cooling the SSD though, perhaps Apple's original drives do not require much more than a residual air flow. I have no personal experience about the adapters and whether any of those adapter versions have better integrated thermal sensor reading, but as much as I am able to read from other posts, the chips are most likely the same, as well as the pin wiring. Some people experience incompatibility with some SSD drive models because of the drives' different architectures (single, double sided, or the newest 970 Evo Plus etc.), but other than that on photos all the adapters look identical.
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This is exactly what I found with my testing of both the Apple OEM 512GB SSD and the Evo 970, both gave similar R/W readings (with the 970 somewhat faster), but under sustained R/W cycles the 970 thermal throttled after approximately 2 minutes to about 1000 MB/s, while the Apple SSD did not. Although both made by Samsung, the Apple SSD board is about twice as large, so I assume better able to manage thermal demands along with perhaps extra chips and/or software controllers.
 
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psymac said:
This is exactly what I found with my testing of both the Apple OEM 512GB SSD and the Evo 970, both gave similar R/W readings (with the 970 somewhat faster), but under sustained R/W cycles the 970 thermal throttled after approximately 2 minutes to about 1000 MB/s, while the Apple SSD did not. Although both made by Samsung, the Apple SSD board is about twice as large, so I assume better able to manage thermal demands along with perhaps extra chips and/or software controllers.
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What do you think of using the ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro 1TB instead of the Samsung 970 EVO 1 TB? I heard that runs cooler, and seems to be pretty much in the same range of performance, even if perhaps not quite as good. It's also a fair bit cheaper!

I'm trying to decide on which of these two to install in my 2017 27-inch iMac's PCIe. Originally I was keen on the EVO, since it seems so popular and a top performer. But the heat has been worrying me, and since the ADATA is cooler and cheaper, this seems like it could be the obvious choice. And yet, it doesn't seem to be very popular here on this forum. What do you guys think?

As for the SATA drive, I'm planning to go with a Crucial MX500 2TB - considered the EVO 860 but the MX500 is a fair bit cheaper and there seems not much difference between the two.
 
Coming from a PC user with the iMac I'd opt to go external for your SSD via Thunderbolt. Why, I'm running an internal NVME SSD on the PC and to be honest in day to day it doesn't seem any faster than the 2.5" SSD's I had connected via TB2 on a 2013 Mac Pro. Most of us simply don't drive I/O that hard most of the time to max out the bandwidth of TB2 let along TB3 and there is enough bandwidth on one of these for a SATA SSD. I run plenty of VM's and do a lot of photo editing and SATA SSD's are fine. I've at no point thought I must replace all of my SATA SSD's with NVME ones. I've actually done the opposite and placed most of my storage external and use tiered storage in a QNAP NAS connected over 10Gig Ethernet. This isn't good enough for data which is sensitive to latency (LR catalogue for example), but it's fast enough for my daily workloads.

I would also avoid taking your iMac apart. it might be out of Apple Care, but the cost of repairing it is a lot more than the price of an external SSD.

Just boot from the external SSD and use the internal HDD as bulk storage. It's simpler, less likely to leave you with a repair bill and will be fast enough.
 
shaunp said:
I would also avoid taking your iMac apart.
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So many people say this! What I would rather is a computer I can afford, by buying a computer with worse specs and then upgrading it. And to not make it pass the difficulties I encounter now, but rather to last me for the next 6 years. That's why I bought an old iMac and am making it faster than anything needs to be right now.

Macs are just way too expensive. Not worth it for many people, especially since buying upgrades through Apple costs an absolute fortune. However, the hardware itself is all that expensive so it really is worth opening them up and making them way better, for affordable prices. Sure it's a shame that Apple don't make it easy for us, but that's a very sad thing, financially and environmentally. But, even though they have made it so hard to upgrade our computers, we do the environment a huge favour in making our computers good enough to last many more years; and also do ourselves a favour for sparing us many hundreds of dollars!
 
Woodlandjustin said:
So many people say this! What I would rather is a computer I can afford, by buying a computer with worse specs and then upgrading it. And to not make it pass the difficulties I encounter now, but rather to last me for the next 6 years. That's why I bought an old iMac and am making it faster than anything needs to be right now.

Macs are just way too expensive. Not worth it for many people, especially since buying upgrades through Apple costs an absolute fortune. However, the hardware itself is all that expensive so it really is worth opening them up and making them way better, for affordable prices. Sure it's a shame that Apple don't make it easy for us, but that's a very sad thing, financially and environmentally. But, even though they have made it so hard to upgrade our computers, we do the environment a huge favour in making our computers good enough to last many more years; and also do ourselves a favour for sparing us many hundreds of dollars!
Click to expand...

So long as you are comfortable with the risks go for it. Good call on the environmental side of upgrades too. That's one of the reasons I'm on a PC now so I can upgrade just the bits I need to.
 
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dobrink said:
I am going to be using ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro which is less power hungry and cooler than your Samsung 970 Evo.
Click to expand...

I was thinking the same. How did that go? Feel it was the right decision?
How about anyone else here, have opinions on ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro vs. Samsung 970 Evo? Hearing the ADATA is cooler and cheaper and sounding like roughly the same performance (perhaps not a noticeable different in real world usage), it seems the ADATA would be the best choice.
 
First, thank you all, for your info found here.

I did order a EVO970 as a replacement for my iMac late 2014 blade together with a Crucial MX500.
Btw, I did receive a EVO970 PLUS. Does those blade's works? I didn't see /found any comment or results with that blade.

I did see both directly in the disk util app. So far so good. In the 'This Mac' I (did) see both.

Goal is to have the blade divided in three partitions. Regulair macos, beta macos and a windows partition.
and one big crucial data Crucial drive.

However, I can't create 3 partitions, just two.
I did format the ssd as APFS.

However, after trying to install macos Mojave on whatever partition, it never finishes.
No after 6-7 times I do get the bug reporter and have to restart.

Before I remove the blade to work for now with de ssd, I have a few questions.
Does sound the above issue's familiair?

I did see at the Samsung site that there are firmware update's available for mac, but not yet for the EVO970 PLUS. Could this be an issue, now or later?

Should the drive's formatted as APFS or the older filesystem?

I do have the longer adapter - https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B01CWWAENG/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 - which fits okey.
How ever I see two small 0,4mm metal parts that could touch the original connector, so I did left a tape thickness space. Not sure if this could create a short cut.

Again before I do remove the blade to continue, I hope that someone can give some inside/light on this.

Thanks in advance
 
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In the meantime, I could Install Mojave on the ssd MX500 drive.
But after some time the Mac gets a kernel panic.

DriveDX show about the blade no issue's but only that the value of the temp sensor2 is often very low. At the moment it is 66ºC. Sensor 1 is at the moment 55ºC. But I see also values from S1 45º and S2 34º.

Are those value's safe?

The FW from the blade is 182QEXM7
 
I have a late 2014 27” Retina iMac with a 3TB Fusion and I am considering swapping the fusion out for all SSD. Mostly I use my iMac for Photos, iMovie, web browsing, pages, numbers... Question is do you think I would notice much of a performance gain for an all SSD setup? If I did upgrade, do you think I should keep the existing 128gb Apple blade or replace along with the spinning drive?

Appreciate the feedback.

P.S. I have taken older iMacs apart so working on it does not worry me.
 
icemantx said:
I have a late 2014 27” Retina iMac with a 3TB Fusion and I am considering swapping the fusion out for all SSD. Mostly I use my iMac for Photos, iMovie, web browsing, pages, numbers... Question is do you think I would notice much of a performance gain for an all SSD setup? If I did upgrade, do you think I should keep the existing 128gb Apple blade or replace along with the spinning drive?

Appreciate the feedback.

P.S. I have taken older iMacs apart so working on it does not worry me.
Click to expand...


Yes you will notice, specialy with caching. I do it right now.
 
ipadawan said:
Btw, I did receive a EVO970 PLUS. Does those blade's works? I didn't see /found any comment or results with that blade.
Click to expand...
If the 970 EVO Plus works, it's fine. It's supposed to be a little faster and slightly less expensive than the 970 EVO.

There was a firmware upgrade a few months ago on the Plus. I don't know the date. There's a big long thread on this and how to update the firmware on a PC. Any bought after the date work fine in a Mac so, if it works, it works.

When you put it together, use blue masking tape, install the OS and fire it up. If it works, the firmware is up to date and you can now use the correct double-stick tape to put it back together,

If your Mac is a 2015 or older, good idea to replace the NVRAM battery at the same time. Apple uses the heat resistant BR2032 (find it on Amazon). If there's no HDD in there, you can get away with the standard CR2032 medical/electronics battery available everywhere.

Best to install the OS after installation using the complete installer for High Sierra or Mojave. Any remote drive with a complete installer works including USB. Then restore from a backup. Do not clone the OS onto the blade before installation—many problems reported from those who did it that way.
 
@mikehalloran,

Good tip about to replace the battery, I was thinking about that, but did forget to order.
I got it almost working. I did do the FW update and did get less issue's, Installing on the blad take a long long long time. Ridicules long.
Tomorrow I will receive a heatsink, I did order it today. The blade do get really hot. However I didn't see any kernel panic any more after the FW update, I will , when I add the heatsink around the blade, use in the mean time the kapton tape.

For now I will copy the original drive onto the MX500, so when the blade runs fine, I can move things at high speed.

The battery is for next time, maybe when I replace the i5 with an i7 ( when they are somewhat cheaper ).

Do you or some one know if the iMac can run without the display connected but with an external connected screen?
 
It works, the second display. But not when I startup with D key to initiate a diagnostic test. Then it doesn't light up.

There is plenty room with the heatsink. What do you mean with "behind the speaker"?

The storage thing is, it runs now even slower then without the heatsink. I did add kaptor tape, but still very slow.

I was shore that the speed for the eve was 4 times but it is now according "This mac" info only two times.
with or without in did not measure any shortcut.

About my late 2014 model 27" 5k, is it possible to let it , the blade, run a 4x speed.

Tomorrow I will remove the blade to test some things.
 
added some results

I did try to work without the screen connected, just an external display.

It works, I even didn't put the mobo and power board inside, I just let them hangover with some cardboard, the only wire that you let your movement freedom very narrow is the power connector from the back power connector to the power board. The connector back down right sided on the power board. Maybe, later, I will create a small extension cord for that and a wooden standard.
Any way, testing this way is more easy, because you can test without every time to disconnect the cable's. If this is recommended , I don't think so, but where is the fun not playing dangerous.

A side note;
You can't start with the D key.
The fan will run always at its fastest speed, lot and lot of noice.
The system is very slow. during startup with or without 'alt' key
The systems reacts always a few second late. Speed of the SSD en Blade are also very slow.
Turning off the machine takes a long long time.

If you got it working. Turn it off. Connect the display. Start again at full speed.

I got a late 2014 27" 5K, now with an EVO 970 Plus plus a heatsink and a Crucial MX500.
Bootrom 228.0.0.0.0

I am not sure if I should have 2x link width instead of 4x. I got around 480MBs read. Did hope to have it faster.
Any idea's if this is right about the 2 x link width, or....?
 
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