I don't know of anybody ever having tried this but it might be a very interesting configuration (and a cheaper way to get 2 TB of overall very fast storage than a 2 TB PCIe SSD from Apple.Ģ. If the iMac had been a more recent one, which offer increasingly faster SSD speeds with the latest one going beyond 2 TB/s, it might have made sense to create a new Fusion drive based the very fast 128 GB SSD part and your new 2 TB SATA SSD. There are other performance aspects than transfer speed like random access time and I don't really know whether a four-year old PCIe SSD does better in those than a 2017 SATA SSD. Which brings us back to speed being more consistently fast (even if a bit slower for some things). The point of this comparison of numbers is that going from a Fusion drive that offers speeds of maybe 700 to 800 MB/s to a pure SATA SSD offering about 550 MB/s can in principle mean a small stepdown in speed for some tasks. Whether the built-in SSD matches that rate is unknown but presumably it should deliver more than what is possible with a SATA connection (about 550 MB/s). Now, if I interpret the information at Mactracker correctly, the SSD part in the 2013 iMac uses a 5 GT/s PCIe x2 connection (meaning PCIe 2.0, two lanes) which translates into 1 GB/s as possible transfer speed.

With a Fusion drive, things are fast most of the time but then for some things the disk access slows down considerably. In regard to speed, you should notice foremost more consistency. While some work (that you and me would outsource), certainly doable and mostlylost has already linked to a supplier of the needed parts. You need an adaptor to go from 3.5' SATA to 2.5' SATA including something that keeps the SSD in place and you have to remove the screen off the iMac. At the moment, around 1Tb is used.Īs already said, the 3 TB HDD part of your 3 TB Fusion drive can 'relatively easily' be replaced with an SSD as it uses a SATA connection. Is it possible to replace the Fusion Drive with a 2Tb SSD? If so, will I notice a lot of (speed) difference? I'm working with large (photo)files in Lightroom and other software. I'm working on a late 2013 iMac 27' i7, 3Tb Fusion Drive/ 32Gb Memory.ġ. I just have a few questions about Fusion Drive vs.

Swap 2017 mac mini hard drive with ssd