Change the SSD in an iMac

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cyril7

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#2260039 18-Jun-2019 10:26

Hi, so you already have a number of external drives attached, can you not move some of your files to those and free up space?

Cyril

Jase2985

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#2260045 18-Jun-2019 10:31

or just get bigger external drives

dt

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#2260050 18-Jun-2019 10:34

Peppery:]

Your drive should be the proprietary SSD then, so you should have the empty bay and could add a SATA SSD while keeping your current drive. Slightly more cost effective as you can use any drive and all you need is the power cable.

I’m in central Auckland if you do need install assistance at all (Ex-Mac tech of 8 years)

This.

You'll have a m.2 ssd as your primary drive, there will a spare SATA connector inside of the iMac they normally use for a secondary storage drive like a large capacity mechanical HDD.

Adding a 1-2tb sata SSD as a secondary drive is heaps easier and cheaper as it only really requires removal of the LCD panel but replacing the m.2 drive pretty much requires pulling most of the machine apart

I'd seriously consider @Peppery offer if setting up a NAS is out of the question

Geektastic

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#2260268 18-Jun-2019 14:56

cyril7:

Hi, so you already have a number of external drives attached, can you not move some of your files to those and free up space?

Cyril

None of them are fast enough as working drives for Lightroom and Photoshop. The USB ports are 3.0, FWIW.

Mainly it is because it's easier to work off the internal drive and use the external drives for storage. It does not really appear that Apple have set up Finder etc with the intention that things should be anywhere other than where the system wants them to be, although since I am by no means a computer expert it could just be my interpretation of the system!

The biggest folder on my drive is Pictures at 392Gb. The ideal would be to pick that up entirely and move it to a portable SSD connected to the USB or TB ports.

However

I do not know if you can move the whole folder - the system seems to expect Pictures to be where it is
It contains both images and Lightroom catalogues
Various backups (Crashplan Pro and Time Machine) are set to back up that folder to NAS and offsite and other drives, so will not back up the correct contents if I move them

As I said, I am no tech whizz, so I do not want to do anything that might require knowledge or ability above my paygrade!

timmmay

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#2260318 18-Jun-2019 15:24

Could you have two collections of images, one on your internal drive that you're actively working on / processing, another set on another drive that is processed and you don't need super high speed access? I agree USB 3 might not be quite fast enough in practice, Thunderbolt should be ok.

I have my working RAW images on hard disk, with only caches on SSD. Works fine, with my 12MP camera and older CPU. That might not be the case for newer cameras / CPUs, but a good hard drive can deliver 150MB/sec and CPU is more likely to be the bottleneck.

cyril7

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#2260323 18-Jun-2019 15:29

So you say the current external drives have insufficient speed, as I understand it assuming you have a USB3 interface (and just talking the original USB3 standard) then there are a number of external SSD drives around that will easily keep a USB3.0 bus near maxed out, I believe the Samsung T5 on an original USB3.0 bus can shift just over 400GB/s, these are aroudn $160 for 500GBytes and $300 for a 1TB.

As for shifting you default home folders this is pretty straight forward, but do you really need to do that, can you not just learn to use a different location?

Cyril

Geektastic

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#2260452 18-Jun-2019 18:52

cyril7:

So you say the current external drives have insufficient speed, as I understand it assuming you have a USB3 interface (and just talking the original USB3 standard) then there are a number of external SSD drives around that will easily keep a USB3.0 bus near maxed out, I believe the Samsung T5 on an original USB3.0 bus can shift just over 400GB/s, these are aroudn $160 for 500GBytes and $300 for a 1TB.

As for shifting you default home folders this is pretty straight forward, but do you really need to do that, can you not just learn to use a different location?

Cyril

I really don't know. When I click on things I imported to Lightroom, I expect them to be there.

Lightroom has not been a smooth journey. I realised after a while that I actually had two versions of it running in parallel which were almost identical in name, appearance and icon because one was a stand alone version and the other the CC plan version - so I actually have two somewhat randomly filled Lightroom catalogues that I have yet to work out how to safely merge...

I am really not the best person to be mucking around with these things - which is why "pick it up and put it on a bigger drive with the same names and locations inside the machine" is the easiest answer for me. Except it appears not to be, in fact!

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Geektastic

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#2260553 18-Jun-2019 22:47

Peppery:
Geektastic:
Peppery: Where are you located? There is some element of risk on the tech as the screen is glued on and needs to be carefully removed. In saying that, i’ve done a number of these without issue.

Also, if your machine was configured as SSD only, then you’ll have an empty SATA drive bay inside. You could potentially get away with a cheaper 1TB SATA SSD in there along with your 500gb one.

It was configured with the drive it currently has.

I did add more RAM later.

Your drive should be the proprietary SSD then, so you should have the empty bay and could add a SATA SSD while keeping your current drive. Slightly more cost effective as you can use any drive and all you need is the power cable.

I’m in central Auckland if you do need install assistance at all (Ex-Mac tech of 8 years)

Now I am wishing I did not live 80km from Wellington!

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