Chosen Solution
I have a Samsung PCIe SSD 12x16 pin 2380 Blade that I need to erase and reformat but i’m getting corruption errors and not able to find an appropriate enclosure to have it reformatted externally. I plan to not use the slot and leave it empty and just add on this SSD as my only storage device for files, OS etc. My question is will my iMac still work without a SSD Blade in the PCI slot and only the SSD in place of my current HDD ?
Sure you can take the 8.0 GT/s PCIe/NVMe blade SSD out and only use the SATA III (6.0 Gb/s) port to hold a replacement SSD instead of your current HDD. Just keep in mind the PCIe port is much faster than the SATA If you want an external case this should work OWC Envoy Pro If you want to maximize your PCIe/NVMe port checkout these SSD’s OWC Aura Pro X2 SSD Even going with a 489 GB SSD might make sense depending on your workflow. Here I would use the blade SSD as your boot drive with your apps, leaving the rest of the drive empty! Then using the SATA port to hold either a HDD or SSD as your data drive (not using Apples FusionDrive setup) this gives you the maximum performance the system can offer.
