Can anyone explain the purpose of a 32 gig NVMe SSD? I think it's quite an apple thing to install such a stupidly tiny drive into a computer, but on the other hand it doesn't seem right. This can't be a system drive can it? But what else could it be? This is like an impractical, high-speed USB drive that requires disassembly of the computer to remove...
It’s probably an SSD for a Fusion Drive setup: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_Drive
It seems to check out for iMac in 2019.
Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
Fusion Drive is a type of hybrid drive technology created by Apple Inc. It combines a hard disk drive with a NAND flash storage (solid-state drive of 24 GB or more) and presents it as a single Core Storage managed logical volume with the space of both drives combined. The operating system automatically manages the contents of the drive so the most frequently accessed files are stored on the faster flash storage, while infrequently used items move to or stay on the hard drive. For example, if spreadsheet software is used often, the software will be moved to the flash storage for faster user access. In software, this logical volume speeds up performance of the computer by performing both caching for faster writes and auto tiering for faster reads.
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Giving it a fancy name does not hide the fact it would be much better to replace the HDD with an SSD the same size. Typical Apple - marketing over substance.
Well to be fair they rolled these out back when SSDs were much more expensive and typically you could choose to pay extra for a real SSD.
2019? Even if that was the last year for it, it should've been replaced by SSD years earlier. Small SSDs for caching made sense in ~2011, but not much later.