Chosen Solution
I’m hoping you guys can do a tear down at some stage as I want to see what’s involved in getting to the hard-drives. I’m not confident it’s exactly the same inside as the 21" teardown you’ve done. Thanks in advance! db
Even with the thin display it is glued to the body. Which takes a heat gun and a bit of force to get that display off. With Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 as interface options I would highly recommend buying an external drive instead of trying to open your iMac. It would be a shame to pay a premium for the computer to break the (probably) expensive display.
You would need to remove the display, but is not recommendable because is very thin, between 3 and 4 mm and that make very very fragile, it’s like handling a 27" glass with 4 mm thick
Usb 3.0 could be an option BUT The new iMacs more likely have a SATA III connector in their motherboard and that’s 6 Gbit/s - 600 MB/s; USB 3.0 is 5 Gbps so there is a “theoretical and practical” loss of speed. Ideally connecting a good SSD via Thunderbolt would allow to reach great speeds BUT the only thunderbolt adapter I know of that can allow that would be the Seagate GoFlex Desk 3.5" Thunderbolt Adapter (STAE122); unfortunately it appears that even this GoFlex adapter has a SATA II connector which would take the whole setup a step back in terms of speed.
it is faster the internal fusion drive than your solution. I will try with my pegasus R4 thunderbolt drive or you can use the lacie thunderbolt that use 2x2,5 hdd, simply take out normal hdd and replace them with 2x ssd
I brought a Little Big Disk 1TB Thunderbolt(LBD) and installed 2 128GB SSD(crucial M4 - $106 each) and have my OS on that. I also use the Pegasus R4 for my workflow files. I have tried the SSD’s in the pegasus and while fast my boot times were still around 45 seconds. I get 15 seconds with the OS on the SSD’s via the Thunderbolt LBD. I didn’t go with the LBD SSD stock option because of the speeds. Using my own SSD’s in the 1TB LBD got me faster speeds. LBD 2-128GB SSD is 409/598 write/read Pegasus R4 4-1TB in raid 0 for 4TB 560/452 write/read Pegasus R4 2-2TB in raid 0 for 2TB 380/235 write/read LBD 1TB stock 213/224 LBD SSD stock 333/475
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