2014 imac running on external ssd

[pcpete]

We have a bad logicboard which does not allow this imac to detect hard drives. We are testing it running on a Samsung external ssd. It seems to run well. Do you guys have any experience doing this. Do you think the performance will be similar to an internal ssd?

 

[Tech Savvy]

Depends are you using Usb 2? Usb 3? I think the 2014 should have USB 3.

I think if you’re using usb 3 the bottleneck would actually be the hard drive read/write itself. Are you using an ssd external? Is the external going to be your hand chosen ssd slapped into an enclosure? At any rate I think your performance should be similar. Maybe ever so slightly less, but I don’t think the user would notice anything and it sure as hell beats the price of a new mac.

 

[kwest]

Velcro a ssd to the back and call it a custom. It will work just fine.

 

[SAFCasper]

I don't recall the model but I've definitely done this before with an iMac and the results were good. It was one of those iMacs where the screen is glued down and I wasn't confident replacing the HDD on-site so we went with an external SSD.

Maybe on benchmarks SATA would be faster? But it certainly didn't feel slow. You got the same "wow" difference you expect when going from a 5,400rpm drive to SSD. The client called us back to upgrade their daughters MacBook a month later so it must have been good!

We just used a standard 2.5" USB3 enclosure + Samsung Evo. Velcro to the back of the machine.

 

[14049752]

A thunderbolt or firewire enclosure would be better than USB, if it has the port.

 

[sapphirescales]

It depends what you're comparing it to. Compared to the internal 5400rpm drive it will be about a 2.5x speed improvement. Compared to an internal SATA SSD, it's up to 50% slower. Compared to the internal blade SSD, it's about 80% slower. In other words, these are the speeds you should expect:

Internal 5400rpm hard drive: ~100MB/s
External SSD: ~250MB/s
Internal SATA SSD: ~500MB/s
Internal blade SSD: ~1,800MB/s

If you use a top quality external SSD (i.e. build your own using a good quality external drive enclosure and a Samsung SATA SSD), you might be able to squeeze an extra 75MB/s-100MB/s out of it. I highly recommend against those small external SSD's like the Samsung T5 for running an OS. They're mSATA drives and tend to overheat like crazy when being hammered on by an OS.

 

[pcpete]

It depends what you're comparing it to. Compared to the internal 5400rpm drive it will be about a 2.5x speed improvement. Compared to an internal SATA SSD, it's up to 50% slower. Compared to the internal blade SSD, it's about 80% slower. In other words, these are the speeds you should expect:

Internal 5400rpm hard drive: ~100MB/s
External SSD: ~250MB/s
Internal SATA SSD: ~500MB/s
Internal blade SSD: ~1,800MB/s

If you use a top quality external SSD (i.e. build your own using a good quality external drive enclosure and a Samsung SATA SSD), you might be able to squeeze an extra 75MB/s-100MB/s out of it. I highly recommend against those small external SSD's like the Samsung T5 for running an OS. They're mSATA drives and tend to overheat like crazy when being hammered on by an OS.

maybe top end speeds are less, but is user felt performance less?. I think the reason SSDs really boost performance is seek time. As long as that is not hindered by the usb, I think it should be good.

 

[sapphirescales]

maybe top end speeds are less, but is user felt performance less?

Depends on what they're doing. For general startup and web browsing, they won't feel any (noticeable) difference. But if they're doing any heavy file tasks, then they'll definitely be able to notice. For example, if it's a photographer that needs to generate hundreds of thumbnails from raw images, then going from a blade SSD to an external SSD would be devastating.

The OS/programs can only benefit so much from an SSD. There's very little noticeable difference between a SATA SSD and even the fastest NVMe SSD's that can reach up to 3,500MB/s when it comes to opening programs and starting up Windows. But when it comes to file tasks, you can really tell the difference between different SSD's.

For example, I have a massive client list. It used to take 1+ minute to open on a hard drive, so I upgraded to an SSD. Eventually when I got even more clients, it took 20+ seconds to open on the SATA SSD, so I upgraded to an Intel Optane drive. Now it opens in about 3 seconds. I notice absolutely no difference with anything else on the computer except that it opens my client list faster.

 

[pcpete]

on a side note, I had a samsung T5 I wanted to use up. Hopefully it does not get too hot. I am getting 400+ MB/s both read and write. I am not sure I can enable trim on an external, even without, I think the drive will last if the client is just doing basic stuff on it

 

[SAFCasper]

I am not sure I can enable trim on an external, even without, I think the drive will last if the client is just doing basic stuff on it

Thunderbolt drives can use trim but for USB it's hit or miss... with the odds heavily favoured toward miss.

 

[Markverhyden]

I've done this a number of times for various reasons. USB is only for short term things like troubleshooting or data recovery. Long term I'll only use FW or TB. Even had RAID working on both FW and TB.

 

[timeshifter]

Twelve South Backpack for iMac and Apple Displays | Hidden Storage Shelf for Hard Drives and Accessories (Silver)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00C1C1WU2/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_wFxjFbWCZCH75

 

[timeshifter]

This might be a good solution for a problem I'm working on. Customer bought a low end iMac in April for the music studio in his basement. It's criminal, but it came from the factory with a 5400 RPM drive and the whole machine feels slower than you know what. After I'd set it up I explained to him that it's like that because he bought the wrong machine (and didn't consult me first). So now he's basically stuck with it.

Now there's a problem. There's a program he needs, a label maker for a Crosley Jukebox. Only 32 bit and no plans of it being updated. Hi OS is Catalina that won't run it. Rather than run Mojave in a VM in his dog-poop slow machine or downgrade the whole machine to Mojave I was going to sell him an old MacBook Air just for that app. Maybe booting from an external USB SSD with Mojave would be the answer?

 

[pcpete]

I've done this a number of times for various reasons. USB is only for short term things like troubleshooting or data recovery. Long term I'll only use FW or TB. Even had RAID working on both FW and TB.

I did a quick search for thunderbolt 1 enclosures, they seemed non existent. I am sure I did not look hard enough


edit: is that thunderbolt one on the back of a 2014 imac?

 

[Markverhyden]

@timeshifter, you can't natively run an OS that is older than what the machine originally shipped with. So it'll have to be VM'ed. On the 5400? Apple just never ceases to amaze me at their efforts to deliver world class customer dis-service. I doubt that the price differential, whole sale, between a 5400 and 7200 is $10/unit.

@pcpete, search for thunderbolt to sata adapter. There's tons of stuff out there but it's expensive. If it was me I'd just buy a Lacie with the TB. They have all kinds of options, including SSD/NVMe.

https://www.lacie.com/products/rugged/#specs

https://www.amazon.com/LaCie-Rugged-Thunderbolt-USB-C-Portable/dp/B071FWB8L2

 

[pcpete]

@timeshifter, you can't natively run an OS that is older than what the machine originally shipped with. So it'll have to be VM'ed. On the 5400? Apple just never ceases to amaze me at their efforts to deliver world class customer dis-service. I doubt that the price differential, whole sale, between a 5400 and 7200 is $10/unit.

@pcpete, search for thunderbolt to sata adapter. There's tons of stuff out there but it's expensive. If it was me I'd just buy a Lacie with the TB. They have all kinds of options, including SSD/NVMe.

https://www.lacie.com/products/rugged/#specs

https://www.amazon.com/LaCie-Rugged-Thunderbolt-USB-C-Portable/dp/B071FWB8L2

when I looked I was only getting the newer thunderbolt which uses a usb-c interface

 

[sapphirescales]

Apple just never ceases to amaze me at their efforts to deliver world class customer dis-service. I doubt that the price differential, whole sale, between a 5400 and 7200 is $10/unit.

Leave it to Apple to put in a 5K screen that nobody asked for yet use 30 year old storage technology to save a few bucks. Even back in 2012 they could have afforded to put a 1TB SSD in there for the asinine $1,800 price tag on their base model 27"

 

[sapphirescales]

when I looked I was only getting the newer thunderbolt which uses a usb-c interface

The one @Markverhyden linked to has a thunderbolt 2 connection in the picture, but says it's USB-C in the description. The interface on the drive itself seems to be USB-C and the interface that goes into the computer seems to be Thunderbolt 2. I've never used one of these drives before so I can't tell you what you'll actually receive, but if you can buy a pre-fabbed solution like this, that would be better than trying to hobble together something using a cheapo Chinese enclosure and a regular SATA based SSD.

 

[Markverhyden]

when I looked I was only getting the newer thunderbolt which uses a usb-c interface

They'll have drives for years to come with the traditional TB port. The one I posted has the traditional TB connector and USB-C which I believe is only USB. Unlike other systems where they are piping USB and TB over the USB-C connector. I have an earlier version that has USB3 and TB.

 

[timeshifter]

@timeshifter, you can't natively run an OS that is older than what the machine originally shipped with. So it'll have to be VM'ed. On the 5400? Apple just never ceases to amaze me at their efforts to deliver world class customer dis-service. I doubt that the price differential, whole sale, between a 5400 and 7200 is $10/unit.

It took about 10 seconds to open the System Preferences app and there wasn’t really anything else running. My MacTracker said it supports 10.14 and up.