#1579: Apple “California Streaming” event, OS security updates, Epic Games v. #1580: iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 Pro, Apple Watch Series 7, redesigned iPad mini, and upgraded iPad, plus iOS 15, iPadOS 15, watchOS 8, and tvOS 15 Hi, I have a 2019 i-9 iMac and built an external SSD enclosure using a Sonnet Echo Express.But it took me until two weeks ago to truly unleash its power.When I bought the iMac, I unfortunately cheaped out in one important regard. When I purchased a quad-core 21.5-inch iMac with Retina display in 2017 and added a secondary 4K display, I felt that I had spent the right amount of money relative to my needs. With a few delightful exceptions that involve printing history and letterpress, I spend most of my day looking at a screen, tapping away on a keyboard, and manipulating a mouse. #1577: iPhone 12/12 Pro repair program, fix corrupted Chrome extensions, iCloud Mail custom domains, Chipolo AirTag alternative, 10-digit dialing changesAn External SSD Gave My iMac a New Lease on LifeMy work life centers around my Macs. #1578: Apple delays CSAM detection, upgrade Quicken 2007 to Quicken Deluxe, App Store settlement and regulatory changes
![]() External Ssd 2014 Mac And BuiltIt was only once I upgraded to 10.14 Mojave that I found myself waiting seemingly forever for apps to launch and disk-intensive tasks to finish.As I grew increasingly frustrated, 10.15 Catalina appeared in late 2019, and I had two critical 32-bit apps I wanted to keep using indefinitely. The Fusion Drive initially suited me well with macOS 10.12 Sierra and seemed to sail through 10.13 High Sierra without causing me grief. (See “ iMac 1 TB Fusion Drives Have Smaller SSDs,” 7 August 2017.)I didn’t notice the performance tradeoff most of the time. However, Apple had just shifted to including substantially smaller SSDs in Fusion Drives, which I believe ultimately became a huge liability. At the time, spending $300 for a 512 GB SSD didn’t make sense because I needed more storage, and $700 for the 1 TB SSD upgrade was too dear for my budget. Despite having just 16 GB of memory, the M1 MacBook Air runs measurably far faster than my iMac. Do you remember first seeing a Retina display? I remember glancing at one and thinking, “Oh, no, I must not get used to this, or my current screen will seem like it’s composed of giant blocky pixels.” Eventually, my budget let me move to Retina.The M1 chip had the same effect. I soldiered on for another 18 months, through the Catalina release and then macOS 11 Big Sur, upgrading my Mac laptop to each in turn for researching and writing.Purchasing an M1-based MacBook Air finally pushed me over the edge. Parallels Desktop requires heavy disk usage, and it was a slug alongside other apps, even with so much memory available. I chose the cheapest path again, which was upgrading to 64 GB of memory and selling my previous 32 GB to a friend.The extra RAM helped, but not enough. Trend micro trial maximum security for mac downloadSSDs these days rely on NVM Express, a standard built on top of PCI Express, which can offer up to 10 times the rate, challenging the top rates offered by Thunderbolt 3. SATA III SSDs top out just below 600 MBps (around 5 Gbps, USB 3’s base-level speed), which is a few times faster than even a 7200 rpm hard drive.Since then, however, technology and pricing have improved by leaps. Such SSDs package flash memory in a 2.5-inch drive case but are limited by the SATA III throughput rates. With a couple of previous Mac minis, I had switched to an affordable 512 GB external startup drive that used an external SSD in a SATA III format and connected via USB 3. I began using screen sharing to avoid waiting several minutes for Adobe InDesign or Photoshop to launch they launched in about 10 seconds on my MacBook Air.The solution was obvious—I needed faster storage on the iMac. Using a Thunderbolt 3 port, I connected the SSD and formatted it as APFS, without encryption. The step up is an 8 TB NVMe SSD blade is $1349 from OWC that fits into a $79 Envoy Express Thunderbolt 3 enclosure.) (As a gauge of SSD price drops, you can buy a SATA III-packaged 8 TB SSD for under $800, or nearly what I would have paid for a 1 TB SSD upgrade option in 2017. When installation was complete, I restarted into Big Sur using the external SSD. I wanted to leave my internal Fusion Drive on Mojave as a backup position. I restarted into macOS Recovery (hold down Command-R at startup) and installed Big Sur onto the SSD. I set System Preferences > Startup Disk to boot from the cloned SSD. Thunderbolt 3 SSD performance, bottom.This performance improvement made a huge difference with drive-intensive apps. Fusion Drive performance, top. On the external Thunderbolt 3 SSD, I consistently measured nearly 1600 MBps on writing and almost 2200 MBps on reading. It worked as I had hoped—everything worked essentially as fast as comparable actions on the host Big Sur operating system managing my Mac.In my interactions with the iMac, it now feels like I had a major hardware update, particularly with Big Sur as the startup system, which makes it seem like a different machine altogether.In testing with Blackmagic Disk Speed Test, my Fusion Drive initially showed hundreds of MBps for read and write, but after a few tests clearly shifted operations from the SSD to the hard drive, rates dropped to just above 60 MBps for writes and a bit above 70 MBps for reads. I was able to edit a 90-minute recording session with five other people into six episodes of a show I host, Pants in the Boot, in a few hours, compared with at least twice that time and a lot of irritation for a previous similar batch a year ago. It used to take minutes to launch and load a project, editing performance was often poor, and exporting mixed-down files was sluggish at best. I had standardized on Adobe Audition years ago, and Audition hits the drive hard. I assume I benefit “heat” wise by not being able to use the 970 EVO at full speed. Note the controller in this enclosure does not give the Thunderbolt 3 speeds of enclosures in the $150 and more price range. I ran every speed test and it performs as good as expected in the Envoy Express enclosure. I also added a 2TB Seagate Barracuda 3.5 HD in an enclosure for a surprising low cost for a pleasingly fast and quiet backup drive.The external 970 EVO has Big Sur on it and has been only lightly used so far. Small price to pay.The speed of the 2019 iMac running on its Fusion drive with Catalina seems similar so far to running Big Sur on the external SSD in said configuration.Yep…straight from OWC…although the OS will install fine to an OWC SSD…the only way to get 5he firmware update is to reinstall the original…and it must be in the laptop and not an external case. The only thing maybe not perfect is since the Envoy Express enclosure is bus powered, it’s short cable limits where I can place it. It has never been hot or deviated even for heavy writing.
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