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Using external SSD to speed up my Mac

Please can somebody help, about a year ago I got advice from the community to use an external SSD st speed up my late 2017 21.5 inch Mac ( which was painfully slow- I had bought the cheapest model) anyway the SSD has worked find, my question is this, is it worth me investing in new iMac 24 inch with M1 ( or m2 m3 if they come out this week) or should I just buy a faster SSD. thanks

Posted on Oct 29, 2023 8:34 AM

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Posted on Oct 29, 2023 9:21 AM

The most common and cheapest external SSD solution (USB3 enclosure holding an SATA 6G SSD) will do about at least 400MB/sec data transfers. It appears the factory SSDs in current iMacs are doing ~3000MB/sec.


As den.thed says, order an iMac with a big enough SSD NOW because you cannot upgrade it later. IMHO, any factory SSD less than 512GB will give you trouble as OS versions grow larger. We are already seeing reports of 256GB SSD's not having enough free space to allow OS upgrades.

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Oct 29, 2023 9:21 AM in response to Winlose777

The most common and cheapest external SSD solution (USB3 enclosure holding an SATA 6G SSD) will do about at least 400MB/sec data transfers. It appears the factory SSDs in current iMacs are doing ~3000MB/sec.


As den.thed says, order an iMac with a big enough SSD NOW because you cannot upgrade it later. IMHO, any factory SSD less than 512GB will give you trouble as OS versions grow larger. We are already seeing reports of 256GB SSD's not having enough free space to allow OS upgrades.

Oct 29, 2023 8:56 AM in response to Winlose777

Hey there!


What external SSD model did you set up, and is the external startup disk solution currently working out for you?


Generally, as long as the Mac is still able to do what you need to do with it, and you used a quality external SSD in the setup, you can hold off upgrading. However, a new Mac would have features you may not currently have.


-Jack

Using external SSD to speed up my Mac

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