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Archive 2014 · iMac and an External SSD

  
 
Ken_K
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p.1 #1 · p.1 #1 · iMac and an External SSD


Has anyone set up a Mac with an external SSD connected via Thunderbold? Is the speed improvement on par with an internal SSD? I'd really prefer an internal drive but am a bit reluctant to do major surgery on my machine.


Mar 26, 2014 at 02:38 PM
howardm4
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p.1 #2 · p.1 #2 · iMac and an External SSD


it should do pretty well. SSDs at best (theoretical) may be between 3-6Gbps whereas TB is 10Gbps. So, with enough handwaving and derating, it should do nicely.


Mar 26, 2014 at 04:34 PM
Bifurcator
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p.1 #3 · p.1 #3 · iMac and an External SSD


Yu won't notice any difference between USB3, TB, TB2, SATAII and SATAIII - no matter whether internal or external. 80% of the I/O is happening at under 100 MB/s and 99% of your I/O is happening at under 200 MB/s which all these interfaces support. There will be a slight difference in "iops" but nothing humanly detectable under normal use. You /might/ notice the iops difference if you were hosting massive databases to multiple users simultaneously but otherwise no. For MB/s you might notice a slight difference between these interfaces if/when you edit multiple layered streams of 1080p/50 or 4k streams but otherwise again, no.

It's not major surgery to add an SSD or even to replace your HDD boot-drive with an SSD. So considering all these things feel free to set it up however you like. Normally the only reason to use a TB or TB2 connection to storage is if your storage is a RAID 0 array. 8 HDDs or 3 SSDs might like to be on a TB connection if external. But if your running the SSD RAID 0 array where each drive is connected to it's own SATA internally that will be just fine too. The reason SSDs are so much faster than HDDs isn't because their top speeds are so much greater but because their low-end is so much higher. So for example, a typical HDD does about 1 to 4 MB/s when reading files of 16K and smaller - which most files are. But an SSD does 20 to 40 MB/s when reading 16k files - and that's a ten to twenty fold increase (literally 10 to 20 times faster). When reading 0.5k to 4k files the SSD is more 50 to 200 times faster and we all go: "WOW!". Still notice however that we're talking speeds supported by just about all common interfaces - even USB2.0. In contrast the top end on a modern HDD is about 200 MB/s while an SSD is only about 400 MB/s - which is only two times. I've extensively tested all these theories (except TB2) on both OS X and Windows even the USB2.0 I mentioned, so these aren't guesses.



Mar 26, 2014 at 06:59 PM
Ian.Dobinson
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p.1 #4 · p.1 #4 · iMac and an External SSD


I've not tried one myself as Tb SSD is not cheap . I picked up a usb3 SSD for good money so I'm content with that .

But having looked around on reviews and demos (on YouTube) there is a noticeable REAL WORLD difference . It seems that large amounts of data thruput on thunderbolt much better .

I think Alan or 15bit on here have some figures (seem to remember someone mentioning figures at some point)

But I will also say on the SSD via usb3 I have noticed huge speed differences from the file system .
Moving my 50gb smart preview file from the imac to the SSD drive was so much faster using hfs+ compared to fat32 or exfat . I don't have the numbers now but I think it was about 5mins for the hfs but 20 mins for the FAT .



Mar 27, 2014 at 02:53 AM
Ken_K
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p.1 #5 · p.1 #5 · iMac and an External SSD


Thanks for all the feedback. Much appreciated.
A couple of follow up comments - I've only got USB 2.0 so I'm guessing that would be a step back. I have an OWC Voyager external drive enclosure and it has FW800. I just noticed that the newer versions of this enclosure also comes with an ESATA port so that might be a cheaper option and much cheaper than TB.
I have a 4 yr old Sony laptop that I just drop an SSD in and frankly I'm a bit disappointed with the performance. Granted we're talking about Windows but the boot times aren't much faster. I haven't installed LR yet so I may see a big difference there.

Edited on Mar 27, 2014 at 07:54 AM · View previous versions



Mar 27, 2014 at 05:39 AM
Ian.Dobinson
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p.1 #6 · p.1 #6 · iMac and an External SSD


Ken_K wrote:
Thanks for all the feedback. Much appreciated.
A couple of follow up comments - I've only got USB 2.0 so I'm guessing that would be a step back. I have an OWC Voyager external drive enclosures and it has FW800. I just noticed that this enclosure also comes with an ESATA port so that might be a cheaper option and much cheaper than TB.
I have a 4 yr old Sony laptop that I just drop an SSD in and frankly I'm a bit disappointed with the performance. Granted we're talking about Windows but the boot times aren't much faster. I
...Show more


Well usb3 is a big difference over usb2 . but if you have things like esata and fw800 on your laptop then you should see a difference in them as well .

im surprised you didn't see a big boost from the ssd in the laptop . even in a old bog standard netbook I gave the kids to play with dropping a ssd in there made a huge difference .
but you wont see a massive effect on LR . I still think its a benefit (a couple of fm'ers have tested to find little or no boost thoigh) as LR is affected by CPU speed the most .
but if your sending raw files on import to the ssd it does speed things up a bit .



Mar 27, 2014 at 06:02 AM
Mr Joe
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p.1 #7 · p.1 #7 · iMac and an External SSD


I've been thinking about getting a Datatale 4 bay Thunderbolt drive, and running 2 SSD drives. The enclosure is $600-700 -- the whole upgrade would be around $1000. The other 2 bays could be used for backup drives etc.
http://www.macgurus.com/store/Item/RSM4



Mar 28, 2014 at 09:03 AM
Alan321
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p.1 #8 · p.1 #8 · iMac and an External SSD


I don't believe that I have ever got faster than 200MB/s on my ASUS Windows laptop between an internal SSD and an external SSD or striped SSD RAID pair via USB 3.0. Very disappointing.

I used to get 400MB/s and more between my internal SSD and external SSD via thunderbolt when using my MacBook Pro.

These were for bulk backups and such involving 100s of GB; not reading or writing an individual image file.

Transfers to or from an internal hard drive will likely be limited to the speed of that hard drive unless the data is going to or coming from RAM without being stored on the hard drive. Even so, it seems that HFS+ format used by Macs is faster than NTFS or FAT32 used by Windows. I have not yet tried exFAT and I have no measurements.

It could also be that the USB 3 controller in my laptop has been nobbled by not having a high enough data bandwidth. The same happened to the ExpressCard port on my MacBook Pro. Unfortunately I cannot do fair comparisons because my Windows laptop has no thunderbolt and my MacBook Pro has no USB 3. There is no common high-speed interface.


Some SSDs speed things up - especially writes - by compressing the data before storing actually it but as most image files are already compressed there is little gain to be had. Some SSDs will handle already-compressed data much faster than others will - e.g. up to about about twice as fast.

Some SSDs effectively do TRIM and garbage collection automatically whether or not the operating system recognises that the drive is in fact an SSD. Others rely on TRIM commands from the OS to force a clean out the junk and free up space for future writes. Without too much detail, SSDs write only to blank memory locations. Stuff that was deleted without being blanked out will prevent future writes to that location until it is blanked out. Doing this while writing the data slows things down compared with blanking out the deleted stuff well in advance.

Random data reads and writes are far far slower than sequential reads and writes, but an SSD will still be many times faster than a HDD.

Thanks to thunderbolt and OS X you have the option of setting your iMac to boot from the external drive and use it for data storage too, if you want to. It will feel a whole lot snappier than the internal HDD ever did. Just clone your internal system to the SSD and tell OS X to boot from it. What to put on the SSD is limited mainly by how big the SSD is. You can get individual 1TB SSDs these days for about what a 240GB SSD cost just a few years ago.

- Alan

P.S. Important: If you want the external SSD to be used in a single-drive case without needing an external power supply then make sure it draws less than 0.5 Amps (500mA). You might get away with a little more but I got lumbered with a few Sandisk Extreme SSDs that draw 1.6 Amps each and will not function better at than 20 MB/s on a USB 3 port and will not work at all on a USB 2 port. I had fallen for the hype about SSDs using less power than HDDs and never expected they could draw two to three times as much as any USB port can supply. Other SSDs that I have used draw much less.



Apr 06, 2014 at 03:12 PM
Alan321
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p.1 #9 · p.1 #9 · iMac and an External SSD


Mr Joe wrote:
I've been thinking about getting a Datatale 4 bay Thunderbolt drive, and running 2 SSD drives. The enclosure is $600-700 -- the whole upgrade would be around $1000. The other 2 bays could be used for backup drives etc.
http://www.macgurus.com/store/Item/RSM4


I have not bothered to read the link but I suggest that you make sure that you have control over which drives are used within a RAID and which are not and whether you can RAID one pair (or 3) and use the other drives individually, or use two separate RAID pairs. This will ensure that you have maximum freedom to configure the drives however you might want to.

Also check the available power / current rating of each individual drive port and of the total system. Then choose your SSDs accordingly.

- Alan



Apr 06, 2014 at 03:18 PM
Alan321
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p.1 #10 · p.1 #10 · iMac and an External SSD


howardm4 wrote:
it should do pretty well. SSDs at best (theoretical) may be between 3-6Gbps whereas TB is 10Gbps. So, with enough handwaving and derating, it should do nicely.


... unless there is a built-in crisis detector, in which case keep the handwaving to a minimum



Apr 06, 2014 at 03:23 PM
jcuecker
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p.1 #11 · p.1 #11 · iMac and an External SSD


I am curenly using a external drive to boot mine. I used a Buffalo MiniStation as the enclosure; ripped out the old spinnigndrive and replaced it with a 250GB Samsung 840 Evo. Runs great wihtout problems. The imac is so much more responsive now and boots in around 30 secs. Single best upgrade you can do imo.

The other nice plus is that when I go on vacation or work trips I just unplug the drive and hide it or take it with me. Somone steals my imac I at least don't loose all my data and give up any secure info!



Apr 08, 2014 at 11:54 AM





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