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Hi. I got an Imac 27” I5 3.5 Ghz late 2014 and want to upgrade it a bit. I´d like to pull the spinning disk and put in a Samsung blade 970EVO (MZ-V7E1T0BW) but is it Compatible with my Imac ? I also want to get more speed. I’m thinking to upgrade the I5 CPU to a I7 CPU (4790K) 4.0 Ghz is it possible and worth the money ? Thanks in advance Jesper K
@jonaharagon - Is correct Apple uses a custom PCIe/NVMe blade SSD as he describes in his answer. Ideally, I would just add the blade SSD and leave the HDD alone (dual drive). Here’s a good reference on whats needed: The Ultimate Guide to Apple’s Proprietary SSDs But, it’s a lot of work! As an option you can indeed swap out your HDD for a SSD which I believe is what you wanted to do. Here we would use a SATA based drive not a M.2 blade drive. This is the correct Samsung drive: Samsung 860 EVO 2.5” SATA drive It’s a lot less work! Loosing the HDD will force you to use external drives for your deep storage so keep that in mind. I would forgo the CPU upgrade, it won’t offer that much of an improvement! Adding RAM and swapping out the HDD to SSD will offer more improvement. If you really want more performance, I would go for the PCIe/NVMe blade SSD drive. For either I would install a 512 GB or larger drive.
It is possible to upgrade the CPU to a 4790K, review this iFixit guide for some more information: iMac Intel 27" Retina 5K Display CPU Replacement Just don’t expect any support from Apple in the future if you change the CPU out! I assume your warranty has ended anyways, but just something to keep in mind. It is not possible to use a Samsung 970 Evo SSD however. Apple uses a proprietary connector on their SSDs, not m.2, so the drives are not compatible. You’ll want a “Generation 3” Apple SSD, according to this handy guide to Apple’s proprietary SSDs: https://beetstech.com/blog/apple-proprie… If you get a compatible SSD, then you will be able to upgrade it with the following guide: iMac Intel 27" Retina 5K Display Blade SSD Replacement
