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Hi Mayer. I’ve an iMac 5k 27’ 2017 with 1TB fusion drive (yes, I know…. i should have bought with an SSD) but now I want to replace the HDD for a SSD. Does it worth it in terms of speeding the machine? Thanks in advanced.

Hi, my name isn’t Mayer but I will be happy to provide you with some advice! You can add a blade SSD to you iMac and double the storage and performances if your iMac has the slot on it’s logic board. Just buy the part and follow the guide below if you do indeed have that slot. On the the terms of is it worth it, yes! You can definitely notice the performance and speed boost a SSD adds. https://www.esaitech.com/apple-mz-jpv256… iMac Intel 27" Retina 5K Display Blade SSD Replacement

@ajcooke01 Well there is a blade and it is already taken by the SSD part of the Fusion Drive. Jorge can of course upgrade just that blade BUT:

  • He will have to pull the board out of the housing, which is always a bit risky;
  • The blade costs a lot as they are Apple proprietary. On the other hand, SATA SSDs are not that expensive and easier to reach within that iMac. Jorge can instead replace the HDD with a 960GB SSD and “re-build” the Fusion Drive and in my opinion it is always worth it for most applications. And possibly purchase an enclosure and use the 1TB that he would have pulled from the iMac as an external Time Machine back-up drive or for additional storage space.

Jorge - Sorry you don’t want a dual SSD setup for a Fusion Drive. It won’t buy you anything. The blade SSD your system has is so small it’s useless when used with a SATA SSD. While more work I do strongly recommend you break your Fusion Drive setup then replace the small blade SSD to a bigger drive (512 GB if you can swing it). Leave your HDD alone. Now with the blade SSD setup as your boot drive hosting your OS & Apps you’ll have the ideal dial drive setup. a Very fast drive for OS, Apps & cache/paging, then a slower drive for your iTunes content and other Apps data. Here’s a good guide which explains things The Ultimate Guide to Apple’s Proprietary SSDs