Chosen Solution
Hello & Thanks to ifixit Community! Has anyone tried or have more info about Seagate ssd drives for upgrading 27” late 2015 2TB Fusion drive? On paper seems they have higher score than samsung or other brands! I know OWC is the best but too expensive and Crusial , Transcend are just good but want to check if there is anything better than these and samsung evo 870! At the end I have decided to just change the HDD drive and not touch the Blade SSD since I see many people reported that their upgrade after few months failed…And Apple original hard to find in EU and too expensive. Thanks!
I would recommend the WD Blue SSD (same read and write speeds but $100 cheaper). For this upgrade, you will also need to get a temperature sensor.
I’m surprised you are hesitant on going with a PCIe/NVMe blade SSD. While some people have paid the price trying to force fit a M.2 SSD the OWC SSD is quite good. I’ve put in quite a few and have not had any issues with my customers. Often I get systems which have the M.2 SSD’s and find the issue is with them. Availability via iFixit for the OWC Aura Pro X2 Blade SSD appears to be OK iMac Intel 27" (Late 2013-Mid 2015) SSD Upgrade Bundle (488GB or 1TB drive) Which is the size I mostly recommend for most folks. As you want it to be your boot drive and host your applications with about 1/3 of free space for virtual RAM, caching and application scratch space. iMac Intel 27" Retina 5K Display Blade SSD Replacement If you want a real Apple SSD here’s where I go BeetsTech for the PCIe 3.0 x4 interface PCIe/NVMe blade drives 512GB SSPOLARIS Custom Apple SSD1 TB SSPOLARIS Custom Apple SSD While the 2.5” SATA SSDs are also a good choice its I/O is limited! SATA III (6.0 Gb/s) is a lot slower than the PCIe/NVMe interface which gets you effectively 7.9 Gb/s with a lot less overhead than what SATA offers! Which is nothing to sneeze at! Most of todays drives are hitting the limits of the SATA I/O channel with its overhead you only get 4.8Gb/s.
