Best SSD for iMac

[miniman]

I'm fetching my (1 month old) iMac (3.6Ghz 8GB) back to the Genius bar on Friday because it is dog, dog slow. *Everything* (e.g. even opening "About this Mac") gives a spinning rainbow wheel and compared to my Macbook Pro it is like going back 10 years. So either it is faulty or I should have ticked the SSD box.

Has anyone upgraded and have any recommendations for which SSD to use? Crucial 1TB for £100 seems like a good bet (everything is in the cloud so don't need mega local storage).

[Bikerjon]

I assume this is the 21.5 inch retina iMac with the standard (very slow) 1TB drive? Get a refund or try to exchange for the fusion drive model.

[miniman]

Bikerjon said:

I assume this is the 21.5 inch retina iMac with the standard (very slow) 1TB drive? Get a refund or try to exchange for the fusion drive model.

That's the one. Going to push them to swap it for SSD version but the upgrade cost for SSD seems significant compared to the cost of a drive from Amazon...

[Bikerjon]

That's because the SSD's that Apple fit are way beyond the relatively slow and old tech SATA SSD's that are cheap as chips from Amazon. Even a fusion drive makes all the difference in these machines though.

[mmm-five]

miniman said:

That's the one. Going to push them to swap it for SSD version but the upgrade cost for SSD seems significant compared to the cost of a drive from Amazon...

It's not a standard SSD though, it's a custom-to-Apple NVME SSD connected directly to the PCIe bus - and it much faster than a standard SATA-connected (or external USB-connected) SSD.

Also, I assume you bought the 1TB Fusion drive (don't think they do a HD-only 1TB option) - but the small amount of SSD attached to the fusion drive should make the start-up & OS quite zippy (once it's finished its initial indexing). However doing large operations may always be slow due to the tiny size of the SSD portion.

I'd definitely swap it out for a machine with a small, proper SSD and get yourself an external USB3 SSD (Samsung T5 or Sandisk Extreme for about £120 for 1TB)....if you really need max speed then the 1tb Samsung X5 can be had for about £350...but it is about 5 times faster than the T5 and connects via Thunderbolt rather than USB.

[andygo]

I bought a 27 in Imac before Christmas with a 1tb fusion drive.

I immediately added a 1tb Samsung T5 SSD as a USB C connected SSD drive. All very fast, especially when I added an additional 16mb RAM, which you can only do on a 27inch imac as the RAM on a 21in is soldered in place.

[Fastra]

Is it still a screen off job for this?

[miniman]

You mean the PCIe drives? Do they make a significant difference when you're not dealing with massive amounts of data transfer?

[miniman]

mmm-five said:

It's not a standard SSD though, it's a custom-to-Apple NVME SSD connected directly to the PCIe bus - and it much faster than a standard SATA-connected (or external USB-connected) SSD.

Also, I assume you bought the 1TB Fusion drive (don't think they do a HD-only 1TB option) - but the small amount of SSD attached to the fusion drive should make the start-up & OS quite zippy (once it's finished its initial indexing). However doing large operations may always be slow due to the tiny size of the SSD portion.

I'd definitely swap it out for a machine with a small, proper SSD and get yourself an external USB3 SSD (Samsung T5 or Sandisk Extreme for about £120 for 1TB)....if you really need max speed then the 1tb Samsung X5 can be had for about £350...but it is about 5 times faster than the T5 and connects via Thunderbolt rather than USB.

No it's a 1TB standard disk.

Will look to swap out for a SSD version and plug in some external SSD storage as necessary. Not sure I can be faffed with taking the screen off a 1-month-old machine to swap out the disk.

[vaud]

Otherwise just buy an external thunderbolt SSD and make that the boot/apps/temp drive. There was a thread about it a few months ago.

[andygo]

vaud said:

Otherwise just buy an external thunderbolt SSD and make that the boot/apps/temp drive. There was a thread about it a few months ago.

i did that on my old 2013 21" imac. Went from about 50 secs to 23 secs from boot chime to desktop.

[mmm-five]

miniman said:

No it's a 1TB standard disk.

Will look to swap out for a SSD version and plug in some external SSD storage as necessary. Not sure I can be faffed with taking the screen off a 1-month-old machine to swap out the disk.

Whilst I'd normally never recommend a Fusion drive version, the small SSD part of it will speed it up then - but it's just a stop-gap solution really.

I've got both a 2019 21.5" 4k model with a 1TB SSD and a 2017 27" 5k machine. They have similar processors & RAM, but it feels much faster due to the older machine having a SSD which is SATA-attached. The PCIe-attached SSDs in the newer machines are 5 times faster - so really makes a difference in file saves and transfers - you do notice it on big file transfers, but it's the thousands of little disk IO that go on in the background in High Sierra/Catalina that kill the performance from the slow (5400rpm) HDs.

Boot speed on the older machine is about 20 seconds, and about 10 seconds on the newer machine - but of course will also depend on what start-up items/extensions are installed.

I don't use these disks for long term storage though, as I've got 4x4TB SATA HDs in a Thunderbolt-attached drive bay for that.

Edited by mmm-five on Monday 3rd February 12:33

[Zirconia]

If I were buying again I would still get the fusion. The 1tb SSD option is 540 quid. That is me though tailoring the load out to my pocket.

Though the 27" is a 100 cheaper for some reason. 3.5 vs 2.5?

[miniman]

mmm-five said:

Boot speed on the older machine is about 20 seconds, and about 10 seconds on the newer machine - but of course will also depend on what start-up items/extensions are installed.

When you say boot speed, do you mean from power off?

[mmm-five]

Zirconia said:

If I were buying again I would still get the fusion. The 1tb SSD option is 540 quid. That is me though tailoring the load out to my pocket.

Though the 27" is a 100 cheaper for some reason. 3.5 vs 2.5?

Maybe the base storage config for the 27" is higher, so the upgrade is less?

[Zirconia]

mmm-five said:

Maybe the base storage config for the 27" is higher, so the upgrade is less?

No idea, but when your pockets are shallower on the initial load out, fusion does work.

My 21" is using a 2.5"HD and SSD combo and I understand the 27" uses a 3.5 config though both use desk top chips. I think. Though my 2013 uses a 120gb SSD, I understand that newer ones are a lot smaller? Might be something to consider.

Though my pictures library is too big now that is external.

[miniman]

Just to wrap this up - Apple refunded the iMac and I switched to the Fusion Drive model - it is night and day different in terms of basic performance.

I can't really believe Apple can sell the HDD model as even the one they had in store was painfully slow just opening a browser / photos.

[kusuka]

Glad to hear they swapped.
To anyone reading this and looking for options to speed up their iMac;
Opening the iMac is not straight forward, but an USB SSD works well.
Just get a USB 3.1 enclosure that supports UASP, like Startech ones, and get a medium range ssd like 1TB Corsair MX500.
I'm getting 400MBS read/write speeds.

[OlonMusky]

kusuka said:

Glad to hear they swapped.
To anyone reading this and looking for options to speed up their iMac;
Opening the iMac is not straight forward, but an USB SSD works well.
Just get a USB 3.1 enclosure that supports UASP, like Startech ones, and get a medium range ssd like 1TB Corsair MX500.
I'm getting 400MBS read/write speeds.

That's slow as F still. In modern days terms. But quicker than a 5400rpm hdd obviously.

[vaud]

OlonMusky said:

That's slow as F still. In modern days terms. But quicker than a 5400rpm hdd obviously.

Thunderbolt will see write speeds of 1700MB/s/ 2000MB/s for read with an external SSD.