You can get external SSD storage at a slight discount (VectoTech offers a portable 4TB SSD for a mere $1600), but even USB 3.1 speeds won't compare to a built-in system. The 4TB SSD upgrade will cost prospective iMac Pro buyers a whopping $2800 to upgrade, and for good reason: It's one of the largest, fastest SSDs you can buy in a Mac. If you rely on SSD speed and frequently work locally on big projects, the 2TB SSD may be a valuable upgrade if speed is less of a concern than overall storage, consider sticking with 1TB and buying an external Thunderbolt 3 RAID array with spinning-platter disks, instead. There are various ways to back up your Mac, including traditional spinning-platter hard drives for instance, you can buy a 12TB Thunderbolt 3 RAID drive for $800. Of course, the bigger your drive, the bigger your backup system. As such, if you need the storage and the speed an SSD provides, it may well be cheaper to opt in to Apple's upgrade. Were you to look for a portable USB-C SSD in the same storage range, you'd find prices ranging from $800-$2000 Thunderbolt 2 RAID systems run around $1000 (no pre-packaged Thunderbolt 3 SSD RAID systems currently exist on the market). Who should get the 2TB SSD?įor $800, you can double your Mac's on-board SSD storage to 2TB this is the same price as the 64GB RAM or 10-core CPU upgrade. If you instead need ultimate speed for your files, you might want to look at the 2TB or 4TB SSD.

Users who spend a lot of time working with external storage should be fine with the 1TB standard drive, as well as those who work via network storage. Thunderbolt 3 RAID enclosures have brought external storage options closer to the speed of internal drives, and also made backing up your system an easier prospect.

Unlike most of the iMac Pro's optional upgrades, the 1TB SSD standard is a more reasonable base for most pro users. The 1TB SSD ships as the iMac Pro's standard $4999 configuration its solid-state storage should provide fast boot times for the system itself, as well as speedy local storage for files in progress. You'll also find a single 10Gb Nbase-T Ethernet port, which allows users to connect directly to their network's attached storage (NAS).

That said, it's a lot easier to augment your storage space than your internal processor or RAM: The iMac Pro comes with 4 Thunderbolt 3/USB-C ports, which support connecting multiple RAID arrays these are systems made up of multiple hard drives, and can be used either to help support network storage or as direct add-ons to your Mac.

How to manage external storage for imac