configuring external ssd as storage for late 2013 imac 27

the drive has started failing, forcing me to restore from backups, twice this year. naturally, i have been studying the hard drive replacement/upgrade instructions. i would prefer an ssd, but i have a lot of data (photos) which i would rather not offload to an external drive.

The ifixit upgrade kit optionally comes with ssds ,but only up to 2tb. #Configuring external ssd as storage for late 2013 imac 27 upgrade elsewhere, i have seen 4tb ssds that are within my budget.Ī staff member in my neighborhood apple store said that the reason apple does not ship imacs with ssds larger than 2tb is that the connection bus only allows up to 2 tb. (i think the price of 4tb ssd was simply too high when apple made the specs.) but it did leave me uncertain. Ha! Tell your Apple Store friend to do a bit of reading! The Ultimate Guide to Apple’s Proprietary SSDs & Volume size limits under HFS and HFS+ & Hitting the limits of APFS is both easy and confusingįirst the PCIe/NVMe interface does not limit the size of the drive only the physical limit of the blade holds it back. So far Apple or even M.2 blade SSD’s are both limited presently to 4 TB due to the physical limits of the chips that fit on the blade drive. There is an extended version used in servers which offers 7.6 TB of storage for $1400! These are too big for PC’s. I’m sure larger drives will be coming out in the future but there is a limit of return! These larger drives won’t be cheap and how many people need this depth of storage? Not many, at least not now, maybe in the future. The SATA interface offers a much larger physical space so larger drives are possible! Just looking at HDD’s the largest is a Western Digital 3.5” 15 TB and the largest 2.5” SSD is a Samsung 30 TB both are server drives. #Configuring external ssd as storage for late 2013 imac 27 upgrade.