M13 Feather SSD kit with macOS High Sierra pre-installed. The company armed me with a number of relevant tips, and sent me a 512GB Finally, I stumbled on a company with an office in Birmingham, Alabama calledįledging, whose Feather drives run around 25 cents per gigabyte and are available in up to 2TB of capacity. That’s better, but they were from unfamiliar companies I was unable to chat with.

Perusing further, I found Apple-compatible SSDs for around 30 cents per gigabyte. OWC’s compatible drives on Newegg were 40 cents per gigabyte, and Apple’s on Amazon were an incredible $1 a gigabyte! This is 2019: standard M.2 2280 NVMe SSDs start at 15 cents per gigabyte! A huge issue is that Apple uses proprietary connectors. Finding a NVMe SSD for the upgradeĪs I intimated, there was never any question that the NVMe SSD could be upgraded, just whether it could be done for a reasonable price. With the disclaimers out of the way, here’s how you can upgrade an iMac’s NVMe SSD with something cheaper, faster, and more capacious. If you’re careful, you shouldn’t, but stuff happens. You also run the risk of permanently damaging your iMac. You will also find prices.Another disclaimer: if your iMac is still under warranty, this will void it. There is a lot of detail there about what can and can’t be done. Visit the iMac repair page to find out more about my repair and upgrade service for iMacs. You could even take the opportunity to upgrade to an SSD and make your Mac much faster than when it was new. This is also a great opportunity to increase the size of your hard drive and gain some more storage space. Regardless of your iMac model, it is not necessary to spend several hundred pounds on a hard drive replacement and very often the repair is around the £190 mark for parts, labour and re installation of OS X. Function is perfect with this modification and it reduces the repair cost by around £200! The cost of replacing these drives is very high, but again a generic drive can be used along with a genuine Apple external temperature sensor. On certain iMac models the Apple hard drive has a built in temperature sensor which is specific to that particular model.

It is not necessary to use an Apple labelled drive however as a generic replacement of identical quality and functionality can be used with a much smaller price tag. Should the inevitable failure of the drive occur to you, it is alarmingly expensive to replace it with an original Apple drive. The situation is not helped by ingress of dust into the extensive cooling system so a top tip is to have your iMac stripped and cleaned once a year. This heat is a big enemy of hard drives and will cause earlier failure than is normal. A really common problem on iMacs unfortunately as a large amount of heat is generated inside that nice sleek aluminium housing.

Replace hard drive imac 2015