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iMac with External SSD recommendations

  • 15-10-2022 11:45am
    #1
    faceman
    Moderators, Category Moderators, Arts Moderators, Entertainment Moderators, Social & Fun Moderators Posts: 16,654 CMod ✭✭✭✭


    Hey folks looking for some recs. My 1TB 27” iMac is near 10 years old and in need of a change. I’ve been looking at the new iMacs.

    From a pricing perspective the new iMacs are sparse on storage. Should I go for the minimum storage version and just buy an external SSD?

    I can get a decent 1TB SSD for €130 which is much less than the iMac jump from 256gb to 512gb.

    Is 256gb + 1tb external SSD the right way to go?



Comments

  • #2
    whiterebel
    Moderators, Business & Finance Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 15,034 Mod ✭✭✭✭whiterebel


    https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058267583/imac-with-external-ssd-recommendations

    That's what I would do. Apple costs on storage and RAM are horrendous. Any questions on Macs might get a better response on the Mac forum: https://www.boards.ie/categories/mac



  • #3
    Gregor Samsa
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 9,114 ✭✭✭Gregor Samsa


    Got a Mac Studio last week, with the base 512GB internal storage. I put together a 2TB SSD myself from this enclosure and this NVMe card. Got them both with a good discount on Prime Day (just over €300 in total). OS and apps run on the internal dive, all my documents (including very large Photos and Lightroom libraries) run on the external SSD. Everything is backed up via Time Machine to a 4TB HDD. Of course, apps could be run from the SSD too, but I personally prefer running my apps from the internal drive.

    Just remember one thing: the internal storage is going to be much faster than any external storage. That's part of what you're paying Apple for - which is why I actually think that it's not 100% right to compare the prices with external storage. That enclosure/NVMe combo I have is the fastest possible external drive setup you can get at the moment, reaching about 2,800MB/s both read and write (the NVMe itself can go faster - the bottleneck is the 40GB/S bandwidth of TB3/4 and USB 4.0). The internal storage in the Mac Studio runs at 3,400MB/s write and 4,700MB/S read, which are absolutely phenomenal speeds. That €130 SSD is probably either 500MB/s or 1,000MB/s. Now, even 500MB/s is a lot faster than any HDD, so I'm not saying it's slow, and it could be more than you need. You will only need those speeds if you're doing stuff like editing high resolution video, or moving about a lot of files. Lightroom, for instance, doesn't even us a fraction of the disk's speed when sorting or editing photos.

    You don't say specifically what SSD you're looking at, but if it's the SanDisk Extreme 1TB, I've some personal experience. It's great as a removable drive, but I found it quite unreliable as a permanent drive. I was running my Lightroom library off it on my old Intel MacBook pro, and I found it suffered from weird random disconnects that at one stage resulted in corrupted data. It wasn't that the entire drive would unmount, it was that entire folders would become unavailable and disappear until the drive was mounted again. A load of my photos got corrupted. Luckily I had backups. I replaced it with the very similar WD My Passport 1TB SSD (they're both made by the same company), and while it was more reliable, I did have some issues with leaving it mounted all the time too. It's only anecdotal, but I'm personally not convinced such drives are suitable for use as a permanently mounted, constantly used, drive. But I stress that was on my Intel MacBook, I haven't tried them on my Mac Studio. The enclosed NVMe has been absolutely rock solid so far



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