That’s SATA 3, which is advertised as 6Gb/s. SATA is your standard form of storage connection, and since about 2011, Apple’s SATA connections have supported transfer rates of up to about 600MB/s.

And if you’ve checked our table below to see which connections your iMac has, you will see us mention PCIe as well as SATA. You might notice that in many instances we talk about Flash Drives when referring to Apple products. The Apple Certified Technicians at SimplyFixIt can give you advice on what is the best size Flash Drive for your iMac. If your iMac supports two drives, you may be able to upgrade to a new Flash Drive and keep your existing hard drive for extra storage space. Your iMac will start up much faster, apps will load quicker and just generally, your computer will feel a lot more responsive. In general terms, if you have a hard drive in your computer, and you upgrade to a Flash Drive, then you will see a huge performance difference. I say “hard drive”, but the more modern technology is a “solid state drive” or “flash drive” in Apple parlance. It stores all your pictures, emails, apps and any other data. If RAM is for storing apps and data when they are in use, the “hard drive” in your iMac is for storing everything permanently. Storage Upgrades Fusion Drives and Flash Storage Note that if you wish to find out a bit more about how much memory your iMac currently has, and whether you’re using a lot of that up during everyday tasks, you can check our free guide here Up to very recently, there were more 4GB iMacs out there, but I would say that if you have less than 8GB, you will see a performance boost from increasing your RAM.Īpple have made several different versions of the iMac, so to see if there are compatible upgrades for your iMac, just refer to the table below. The minimum amount of RAM that Apple puts into an iMac now is 8GB. If you have more RAM it means that your iMac will normally feel faster as you are using apps, especially if you are opening multiple apps, or web browser tabs, at the same time. It’s where apps and data live while you are actively using them.

Without getting too technical, RAM gives your computer a high-speed temporary work space.

There are two types of “memory” in a computer, RAM (Random Access memory) and drive storage.

Upgrade imac hard drive