24 MACWORLD OCTOBER 2019
MACUSER UPGRADE AN OLDER IMAC’S PCIE SSDNext up is the easy, affordable plug-
and-play upgrade Fledging Feather M13
SSD. It’s convenient as well, coming with
High Sierra pre-installed, though for $5
you can have a USB stick that allows you
to install Mojave.
Note that the write performance
numbers the company sent me were quite
a bit higher than this, but they were
garnered using a 2015 i7 MacBook Pro.
The CPU does make a difference.
As you can see, the Feather M13 is a
fantastic reader. But it varied from a good
(1.2GBps) to mediocre (600MBps) writer,
depending on whether the cache was full
or not. Regardless, the 2.8GBps reads and
lightning seeks mean you still get that NVMe
kick in the pants, and you don’t have to
worry about a slightly ill-fitting adapter.
Just in case you aren’t so sanguine
about opening up your iMac, here’s the
alternative I talked about—NVMe via
Thunderbolt (go.macworld.com/nvia).
Below are the results from the same 2015
i5 iMac, with an Akitio Thunder2 PCIe
enclosure housing a Samsung 970 EVO
SSD. The older 970 EVO works just fine
(I’ve run High Sierra from it for over a year),
where the 970 EVO Plus did not.The Fledging Feather M13 is a very fast
reader and seeker, but a middling writer. It’s
still light years faster than the original SSD
and definitely gives you that NVMe snap. If you’re otherwise satisfied with the
performance of your iMac, you can get twice-
SATA throughput and 10x seeks running
NVMe in an external PCIe enclosure. It’s not
as cheap, and the experience isn’t quite as
smooth as an upgraded internal NVMe SSD
but it is an improvement.