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I am wondering if the motherboard of a 2017 iMac, which is using the PCIe port for a 2 TB SSD blade, does it have another drive port (SATA) available to add a typical SSD drive? If there is, is it where the mechanical portion of a fusion drive would be hooked up? Will a SSD drive attached to that port be seen by the system as an additional drive or as some type of extension of the current 2 TB SSD blade? Thanks
Your iMac only has two drive ports the 3.5” HDD SATA port and the PCIe/NVMe SSD blade drive. So if you bought a PCIe SSD drive only system you can install the missing SATA drive which could be a 2.5” SSD! But! If you bought a Fusion Drive system you really have a 2 TB HDD with a 128 GB blade SSD. Review your exact systems specs above. If thats the case let us know for other possible options. IFIXIT offers a SSD upgrade kit which you can find here iMac Intel 27" (Late 2012-2019) SSD Upgrade Kit It offers what you’ll need (250 GB, 500 GB & 1TB) options. And here’s the IFIXIT guide you’ll need to follow iMac Intel 27" Retina 5K Display Hard Drive Replacement
Dan, that is exactly the answer I needed. I didn’t know how Apple set up the two ports with a fusion drive but it looks like both ports are independent since I ordered my system with only a 2TB SSD NVME card. Thanks again. Ron The following bit of information has nothing to do with SSDs but it is important if it saves any other people from headaches when upgrading to a new system with the APFS file structure in High Sierra or Mojave. ” DO NOT BOOT FROM AN EXTERNAL MAC OS DRIVE WITH ANY OS that was released before HIGH SIERRA on a MAC withan APFS file structure.. I tried it to check a Sierra drive from my old unit to see if it still booted. It booted fine but I had to completely rebuild my original Mohave partition on my brand new system after the boot. It seems like the external drive tried to communicate with the internal drive and the file structure was different. That caused either something to be written to or something was erased in the new system’s boot area. The Mojave drive could no longer mount. Disk utility showed the partition only as “APFS”(No drive Name) and it was grayed out. I didn’t see any warnings anywhere in current documentation (I could have easily missed it if there was a warning) so I thought an external boot wouldn’t write anything and that it would probably not see the newer OS. Boy was I wrong - after many hours re-establishing Mojave and all the transferred apps.
Yes. I have successfully upgraded my iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2017) with a 2TB Samsung 970 EVO NVME SSD. Please see post below for full details. https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/ima… Thanks.
