It’s all Apple’s fault. I was perfectly happy with my 2011 27-inch Core i7 iMac and its SATA SSD upgrade when I heard that the company had finally started supporting third-party NVMe as of macOS High Sierra. My iMac (old as it is) replaced a Windows PC with an NVMe SSD, and though the iMac is a far superior experience overall, I missed the speed of the NVMe SSD running the operating system. Boot Camp, Logic Pro X...great stuff, but if I could just add NVMe and run macOS from it.
In case you aren’t aware, NVMe is fast—two to six times the sustained throughput of SATA (depending on the drive), with, at times, one-tenth the seek latency. If you’ve used a MacBook Pro from the last couple of years, you’ll understand: Apps pop open, files load and save in and instant, and boot times are ridiculous.
