NVME M.2 SSD with adapter

"First you may want to look at this Vid: 2017 27-inch iMac with Retina 5K Display Unboxing and Teardown jump to the 10:00 time point which shows the PCIe SSD Apple is using. It's very different from the M.2 SSD's.

Apple's PCIe NVMe SSD's use a custom device driver so while you might be able to get the adapter and NVMe SSD to physically fit it won't be recognized by the OS.

While I haven't tried anything in this new iMac I can tell you I've tried the newer MacBook Pro retina series which has a 2 lane NVMe SSD and it didn't work."

"Upgrading an 2017 iMac 27"" with an off the shelf NMVe m.2 SSD + M.2 Apple PCIe adapter is definitely possible.

I am amazed how much confusion information is on the internet about this topic. Even from OWC, which only wants to sell a SATA upgrade kit for the 2017 iMac.

So I thought, try and find it out.

I did my 2017 iMac with a EVO 970 NVMe SSD + Sintech M.2 NVMe to Apple PCEe adapter.

I only recommend the Sintech adapters, others are known to have issues.

I used:

https://www.amazon.com/Sintech-M-2-PCIe-...

I have some images on instagram where I did my upgrade.:

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bs0loRDga6c/

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bs06bPLAz1p/

I am happy I did it and got rid of the FusionDrive setup.

As a note, if you plan to replace the SATA drive with an SSD, which I also did then ""No"" you do not need the overpriced and useless thermal Sensor from OWC either.

I recommend the regular EVO not the EVO Plus or EVO Pro.

If you still insist on using the non standard EVO then Samsung released an firmware update for the EVO Plus that fixes issues on Mac, you need to upgrade it first using a PC before putting the drive in your Mac."

I installed a Samsung 970 EVO 2TB M.2 in my mid-2017 27” 5k iMac and it works great with 4x NMVe speeds.

Samsung has updated firmare for the SSD 970 Evo Plus PCIe NVMe, this is the direct link.

Here is my experience with this upgrade. Hope it helps.

I recently upgraded my iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2017) from a 2TB internal to a Corsair MP400 NVMe PCIe Gen 3 x4 M.2 SSD. I got a tech guy to do it (they supplied the adaptor) and, well, it took way longer than expected, he named the new SSD HD some weird-ass name, and reinstalling and restoring from TimeMachine has been a nightmare, but that’s not why I am here.