If you want to make use of your Mac's Thunderbolt port, then. Buffalo MiniStation Thunderbolt external hard drive. This is the latest generation of the Western Digital My Passport. Western Digital My Passport 4TB external hard drive. Best external hard drives for Mac: How we chose them 1.
![]() Fastest External Hard Drive 2018 Plus IOS 15Double-click the file you downloaded. Dashboard software for Mac OS is available here. MACH.2 Multi-Actuator Hard Drive. #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 15External Backup.#1577: iPhone 12/12 Pro repair program, fix corrupted Chrome extensions, iCloud Mail custom domains, Chipolo AirTag alternative, 10-digit dialing changesSix Lessons Learned from Dealing with an iMac’s Dead SSDThere it was, Wednesday evening, and I was working hard to finish something for the day. #1578: Apple delays CSAM detection, upgrade Quicken 2007 to Quicken Deluxe, App Store settlement and regulatory changes Apple lawsuit decided, Internet privacy limitations, combine Mac speakers #1579: Apple “California Streaming” event, OS security updates, Epic Games v. Coming with storage capabilities of up to 8TB, Seagate have designed a product with the tech-savvy in mind while still keeping thing simple for those who may not be as up to speed with the technologies of today.Seagate Backup Plus Slim 2 TB External Hard Drive Portable HDD Black USB 3.0 for PC Laptop and Mac, 1 Year Mylio Create, 2 Months Adobe CC Photography (STHN2000400) 4.4 out of 5 stars 1,184 3 offers from &163 100.26 ![]() It’s an ex-parrot.Because I’m paranoid that way, I booted from my bootable duplicate (which worked, thankfully), and then set it to update yet another bootable duplicate backup I have on yet another hard disk. That was the first suggestion that the SSD was dead, and indeed, once I could look at the setup with Disk Utility again, it was missing entirely and hasn’t shown up since. Not good.After I forcibly restarted the Mac, it wouldn’t even boot into macOS Recovery, instead loading Internet Recovery. After dinner, I checked on it, and it was 61.6% done, which seemed slow, and when I checked several hours later, it was still at 61.6%. I knew this was going to take a lot of time, and the initial 4-hour estimate kept going up until it was at about 10 hours. The 2014 iMac supports USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt 2, and my Thunderbolt Display adds a FireWire 800 port. But this proved problematic. Plus, while I don’t mind working on a laptop for short periods, the ergonomics of laptop use are horrible, and it’s bad for my body to put in my normal work hours on a laptop.The obvious solution was to run my iMac from my bootable duplicate. My normal desktop is 5120 by 1440 pixels. The “I need to get my work done” Short-Term SolutionAlthough I can get my work done on the MacBook Air, its 13-inch screen running at 1440-by-900 pixels is limiting, especially because I’m accustomed to working on the 27-inch iMac next to a 27-inch Thunderbolt Display. That leads me to:Lesson #1: A bootable duplicate should be fast enough to use as your boot drive, or it’s essentially a read-only backup like Time Machine.For comparison, the internal SSD on Tonya’s identical 2014 27-inch iMac laid down read speeds of about 750 MBps and write speeds of about 500 MBps. I didn’t think of switching to FireWire at the time, but interestingly, it was slightly better at 25–30 MBps for the same drive. USB 3.0 might theoretically be capable of 625 MBps, but when I tested the drive in Blackmagic Speed Test, it averaged just 20–25 MBps for both read and write speeds. The drive supposedly has 128 MB of cache memory, but it’s only 5400 rpm, and while its speed has never been a noticeable problem while making backups, it’s painful beyond belief to use as a boot drive. Thunderbolt 2: 20 Gbps, which works out to 2500 MBpsMy backup drive is a 2.5-inch Seagate 2 TB FireCuda Gaming drive in an OWC Mercury Elite Pro mini external enclosure. Microsoft office for mac torrent redditKeep in mind that I do very little that stresses the drive. Startup was slow but acceptable, and once the iMac was running, performance wasn’t noticeably different than normal. I restarted my MacBook Air in Target Disk Mode by holding down the T key at startup, and then I connected it to the iMac using Thunderbolt 2 and booted from it. For reasons I never figured out, even my extensions in Brave disappeared each time I swapped Mac brains underneath the same storage device. Most annoyingly, iCloud and quite a few apps tie their credentials to the internal hardware of the Mac, so switching from it being a standalone MacBook Air to being a boot drive for an iMac caused iCloud and those apps to ask for authentication every time I wanted to move between machines. So Thunderbolt 2 must be slower than the MacBook Air’s internal bus.Although this approach got me up and running, it suffered from a few other problems. Interestingly, these numbers were quite a bit below what I got when I eliminated Thunderbolt 2 from the equation and tested the MacBook Air’s SSD on its own. Best xbox 360 emulator for macIt was the cheapest and cleanest solution, but it also came with the most downtime and the most risk. (My iMac’s SSD was 500 GB, whereas the MacBook Air is only 250 GB, so the two have similar setups in key ways, but they aren’t identical.) The “I can’t work like this indefinitely” Medium-Term SolutionBetween the split personality problem every time I connected or disconnected the MacBook Air, the slightly inadequate setup, and the kernel panics, I needed a better solution for the next few weeks or months.Once again, there was an obvious solution—replace the internal SSD in the iMac with a new one—and once again, I didn’t take it. It might have worked over Thunderbolt, but I didn’t have a Thunderbolt 2 to Thunderbolt 3 adapter.)Regardless, booting from the MacBook Air in Target Disk Mode meant that I could work effectively on my big screens, and I could even access files and apps that existed only on my bootable duplicate. Worse, a test using Tonya’s 2016 MacBook Pro failed—I could put it into Target Disk Mode, but the iMac never saw it over USB. But the awkwardness of Target Disk Mode made that unattractive. I now came up with:Lesson #2: Target Disk Mode is useful only for occasional troubleshooting and emergency use, not as an everyday driver.(I had briefly considered replacing my MacBook Air with a new model, which I’ve been planning to do soon anyway, and using it to boot the iMac. Worse, in the (extremely useful) TidBITS Talk conversation on the topics, my buddy Ron Risley told a story about how he used OWC’s Hard Drive Upgrade Kit to replace the drive in a 27-inch Retina Mac only to have the re-adhered screen fall off.(I may still go down this path since I’ve now taken over another 2014 27-inch iMac that TidBITS bought for Josh Centers and replaced just a few months ago.
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