Chosen Solution
The NVME M.2 Blade drive has failed on my late 2015 iMac 27 inch. Can I remove it all together and just install use the SSD upgrade kit I got from OWC to run the OS or does Apple somehow require the 32GB NVME M.2 Blade drive to make things work? I have it torn down as per the iFixit guide. I just want to know if this will work before putting it all back together! :)
Todd’s question has not been answered. Here is what he is saying. His iMac 27-in came with two drives, an SSD blade and and HDD. The two are linked as a fusion drive. His SSD has failed. His plan is to remove the SSD entirely and not replace it. He’d like to leave the blade slot empty. Instead, he would like to remove the HDD and replace that with OWC’S upgrade kit. In place of his HDD, he would now have an SSD. After the repair, his computer would run solely on the SSD (installed where his HDD used to be), again, with an empty blade slot. His question is: Will his Mac run normally in the above scenario?
OK, let first talk about what Apple put in is a small 32 GB SSD and is part of a Fusion Drive set with your current HDD. So we do need to first break the Fusion Drive set before doing anything. Follow this guide: How to split up a Fusion Drive. Now you can remove the blade SSD and put a replacement unit in. The next question is if you what to recreate the Fusion Drive set or just use them and independent drives. If you want to create a Fusion Drive set here’s how: How to make your own Fusion Drive Do keep in mind High Sierra has issues with Fusion Drives and OWC’s SSD is a RAID’ed SSD which also has an issue with High Sierra. So I would hold off upgrading to High Sierra for now until OWC announces support.
The original question wasn’t answered still from my undertanding of the owners post they the owner does not want use the blade nvme drive because they dont want to replace a broken nvme which is part of the ‘fusion drive’. They want to replace a rotational HDD which was used as storage with a SSD and install and run the macOS/storage on that alone. Will it work, YES
Just to add to this, I just had the hard drive in my 27-inch 2017 iMac fail. The setup was a fusion drive with an SSD and a (2 TB) HDD. It was the HDD that failed. I pulled out the HDD and replaced it with an SSD (2 TB). I’m booting from that and ignoring the SSD. My iMac has been restored, and it works better than ever.
You can use pcie ssd standalone. If you wipe nvme it will appear as separate drive of small capacity unless you plan to recreate fusion drive utilizing both drives.
