Upgrade iMac Fusion Drive to SSD

[I2C]

Finally swapped out our (slow) Fusion drive today in our 5 year old iMac for an Samsung 870 1TB SSD.

Thought I’d let anyone thinking of doing this the gotcha I came across. Followed various guides on uTube to remove the screen etc., the problem I had was our Mac is using Big Sur. None of the cloning tools I used worked to begin with. What did eventually work was SuperDuper! beta version 3.5. With the move to Big Sur Apple have changed how you can clone a disk!

Boot up is blisteringly fast now, as is visiting web pages and opening files, well worth the effort if you Mac is getting slow and doesn’t have an SSD inside.

 

[Cavs]

I'm running my iMac (2013 vintage) from a Samsung 1TB SSD externally, connected via a USB port. I needed to do something as the internal hard drive was becoming flaky and I didn't fancy taking the machine to bits. You're right, the increase in speed is amazing! I haven't "upgraded" to Big Sur yet.

There's an advantage to having the drive removable: when going away I can put the drive in the safe, so all data is secure. A burglar is welcome to the 8-year old hardware

 

[I2C]

Cavs you can create (in effect) an encrypted folder/volume (did this years ago so forgotten how I created them) and store personal files in them, it'll be protected by a password. I wouldn't encrypt the whole disk, makes running certain applications very slow, e.g. digital media.

 

[Cavs]

Cavs you can create (in effect) an encrypted folder/volume (did this years ago so forgotten how I created them) and store personal files in them, it'll be protected by a password. I wouldn't encrypt the whole disk, makes running certain applications very slow, e.g. digital media.

You’re right, but I was just mentioning an incidental benefit of something I had already done. The external photos and back up discs also go in the safe - very handy.