After I'd bought a 32GB sandisk Ultra 3.0 Flash Drive I realised my USB connection on my imac 21.5" mid 2010 only has a 2.0 USB port.
Will I still be able to use it? I know it won't be up to speed, but I bought it for capacity and for storage.
iMac, OS X Yosemite (10.10)
Yes, I have the same i-Mac and have a USB 3.0 back-up drive attached. It works just fine but as you expected... at 2.0 speeds.
Thats good news.
If you don't mind me asking what are you using as a bootable backup?
I've just found myself faced with limitations when buying an external Hard Drive, due to 2.0 USB ports.
I currently don't have an external HD at all, which I should've got sooner than now.
So, any recommendations or advice will be much appreciated.
I do not have a bootable back-up, only a Time Machine back-up on the external drive. I recently upgraded from a USB 2.0 500 GB Western Digital drive (with the WD software stripped off). That drive started to become full, and as I expect to be replacing the i-Mac in the not-too-distant future, I bought at the local Apple store a 4 TB Seagate USB drive. I do plan to also create a bootable external drive, but have not attempted it yet so I have no experience on what works best with our vintage 2010 i-Macs. However, I suspect that any 2.0 or 3.0 drive would do the trick if large enough. It is always a good idea to do any back-up (like Time Machine) on an external drive as if the internal drive fails, and it contains the TM back-up, all is lost.
Its a sad day for me today, I've come to realise that my imac is now vintage and I need to start saving for a new upgrade Mac computer in the near future.
For now I might buy a segate 4 TB USB like yours or get the Samsung M3 slimline 2TB and make an external bootable backup on that.
There are people that are running machines that are a lot older than ours but sooner or later I expect the HD to fail and wanted to be prepared for that. I did recently upgrade the RAM from 4 GB to 12 GB and felt that was worth it bought me some extra speed & time. This machine does not get used heavily but it is on virtually all the time. I did see on the specs for the El Capitan upgrade that you needed machines of 2008 vintage or newer. That got my attention. That's only 2 years older than this one (butt hat may be a little alarmist as there were significant improvements in those 2 years). I guess time will tell. Good luck with your choice of HD.
Can I use a 3.0 flash drive on my 2.0 USB?
