Chosen Solution

Hello, I have the 5k iMac 2019, it is the MRR12B/A 3.7Ghz i5 version with a 2TB fusion drive. I plan to fit a 9900k and if possible, fit a NVMe SSD in there, but I have a few questions. First of all, do the adhesive screen strips from the 2017 version fit this model? If not, where can I get the correct ones, please? (Edit: found the answer to this on here, it seems they are the same)Does this model have a working NVMe slot?If there is a working NVMe slot, can it accept, say a Samsung 970 Pro NVMe SSD, I already have one of these, would it need some kind of adapter? If so, please can someone let me know which one?Can the 2TB fusion drive be left in place and used as a storage drive, or am I better off picking up a decent 3.5” drive, or even a 2.5” drive + adapter?If I change the fusion drive for another, do I need some kind of diode to stop the fans spinning up? if so, can anyone point me in the right direction to buy this please? Any help would be much appreciated, thanks :)

Lets first look at the CPU, while your system came with a I9-9900K the logic board Apple uses is not the same as the others so upgrading your system may not be possible. Given how new the system is I don’t think anyone has tried doing this yet. As for your drive options: A Fusion Drive is made up of two physical drives the SATA HDD and a small PCIe/NVMe blade SSD. So if you are going to alter the config you will first need to break the Fusion Drive set so you can remove the current blade SSD to replace it with the larger blade SSD. Apple uses a custom SSD made by Samsung but it is not M.2 complaint so you can’t use the Samsung 970 Pro M.2 SSD. The best choice here is to use the custom SSPOLARIS SSD You can read more here The Ultimate Guide to Apple’s Proprietary SSDs Your current SATA HDD (what was part of your Fusion Drive) does not need to be replaced. But, there are better drives being made as an example the Seagate FireCuda SSDH which is a faster drive, as well as larger drives are even possible but their access speed is slower. So depending on what your usage is you likely want a 512 GB blade SSD for your OS, apps & virtual RAM/cache needs. Leaving your work on the HDD. If you are into video or music production you will want a larger bade SSD like 1 or 2 TB here besides what we have listed before we want to use the larger space from scratch and the work being created. In any case you want to leave 1/4 of the SSD unused for the system to leverage for its work space.