Advice on 2017 iMac boot drive?

[tm3]

Hope I am putting this in the correct place. It seems to me to be a pretty basic question but I have not been able to get an answer.

I have "inherited" a 2017 iMac that has a 1TB HD. The previous owner was going to recycle it because it is "too slow." It in fact runs slowly, and my research indicates it is likely due to the HD which are apparently notoriously problematic. The fix is to set up an SSD for use as a boot drive. My question regards choosing the boot drive. The guide I am using says to check with the manufacturer to be sure that the external drive has "the functionality of being used as a startup disk for a Mac." I've used Samsung external HDs for other applications, so I checked with Samsung and am told that their SSD "can be used as a boot drive, but it is not recommended or supported." Huh?

For those who have been there done that, what is your advice? Thanks!

 

[Fishrrman]

One of these should do very well:

SAMSUNG T7 Shield 1TB, Portable SSD, up to 1050MB/s, USB 3.2 Gen2, Rugged, IP65 Rated, for Photographers, Content Creators and Gaming, External Solid State Drive (MU-PE1T0R/AM, 2022), Blue

Samsung T7 Shield Portable SSD delivers high performance on-the-go, not matter the terrain. It has an IP65 rating for water1 and dust2 resistance, with Dynamic Thermal Guard to manage heat control. Transfer huge files instantly. USB 3.2 Gen 2 and PCIe® NVMe achieve soaring sequential read/write ...

www.amazon.com

Then, do this:
1. Download SuperDuper. It's one of the easiest-to-use Mac apps out there, and it's FREE to use for what we're going to do:
Click to download --> download

2. Connect the SSD. If the OS complains that it needs to be formatted, use disk utility to format it to APFS, GUID partition format. (SuperDuper is going to erase it anyway)

3. Now open SuperDuper. Use it to "clone" the contents of the internal HDD to the external SSD. It will take a while, so be patient.

4. When done, go to the startup disk preference pane and set the SSD to be the new boot drive.

5. You're done. Reboot.

Once you have the external SSD running as the boot drive, you can "re-purpose" the internal HDD for whatever you want.
If it was me, I'd just use it as my "backup drive" for the SSD.
That way, if you were ever to have a problem with the external boot SSD, you could just "switch back over" to the internal HDD.
Even though it will still be "slow" -- you'll be back up-and-running in a couple of minutes.

 

[tm3]

Great! Thanks so much! The T7 is what I had planned on buying originally, before the confusion from Samsung about "not recommended or supported." My guess is that is some kind of legalese that does not have a practical meaning.

Also, I like your suggestion for using Super Duper. I have it already so have some familiarity, and this is a simpler way to do it than the other plan I found online.

What I would like to do is use the internal drive as Time Machine -- is that do-able, is that what you mean by it being the "backup drive," or is there a better way to do it?

Thanks again for all of the help!

 

[Fishrrman]

"What I would like to do is use the internal drive as Time Machine -- is that do-able, is that what you mean by it being the "backup drive," or is there a better way to do it?"

I have never used tm and don't recommend it.
I would continue using either SD or CCC to make the internal HDD your "backup cloned drive".

Do this, and if anything goes wrong with the external boot SSD, you can IMMEDIATELY boot and run from the internal HDD.

 

[tm3]

"What I would like to do is use the internal drive as Time Machine -- is that do-able, is that what you mean by it being the "backup drive," or is there a better way to do it?"

I have never used tm and don't recommend it.
I would continue using either SD or CCC to make the internal HDD your "backup cloned drive".

Do this, and if anything goes wrong with the external boot SSD, you can IMMEDIATELY boot and run from the internal HDD.

Will do. Again, thanks so much for helping!

 

[picpicmac]

I have never used tm and don't recommend it.

I've used TimeMachine since I could... and it's saved my ass on a couple of times.

 

[zqbobs]

"What I would like to do is use the internal drive as Time Machine -- is that do-able, is that what you mean by it being the "backup drive," or is there a better way to do it?"

I have never used tm and don't recommend it.
I would continue using either SD or CCC to make the internal HDD your "backup cloned drive".

Do this, and if anything goes wrong with the external boot SSD, you can IMMEDIATELY boot and run from the internal HDD.

Please explain why you don't recommend it. I also have used it for extended periods (but no longer), and it bailed me out a couple of times with certain files. I now rely on CCC to do backups, but TM still seems to be an easy, "hands-off" backup tool.

 

[Fishrrman]

"Please explain why you don't recommend it" (tm)

Because in my years of being here at macrumors, I've seen many reports from users who had a time machine "backup" and then -- in a "moment of need" -- tried to access the backup, and...
... couldn't. The backup couldn't be used.

I've seen very, very few reports from users who said that they had a SuperDuper or CarbonCopyCloner backup that failed on them. Almost never.

That's why.

 

[tm3]

Finally got the T7 SSD, simple setup, the iMac is rocking now!

Thanks again!

 

[ChrisA]

"What I would like to do is use the internal drive as Time Machine -- is that do-able, is that what you mean by it being the "backup drive," or is there a better way to do it?"

I have never used tm and don't recommend it.
I would continue using either SD or CCC to make the internal HDD your "backup cloned drive".

Do this, and if anything goes wrong with the external boot SSD, you can IMMEDIATELY boot and run from the internal HDD.

Using a "clone" type software for backup is the worst advice. Never do that.

Hever is why... Lets say you are working on a project and the file gets corupted. Usualy this is cause of operator error but software can be buggy too. So the file is damaged, 8 pages are just "gone" from the document.

Thisi ok because you have a good backup made by the conning software. But the trouble is you don't know the file is corrupted. How can you check every file on the disk? But as of now you are OK, because you have a backup.

Then you run the daily backup and the only good copy of you data gets over written by the damaged file. This is bad and you have no way to recover.

But had you used Time machine, you would have the full time history of the file with snapshots taken every hour. TM NEVER overwirtes old version. of the data so you can go back to an hour before the file was corrupted.

TM s also very fast, so fast that you really can run it every hour as it only records the changes made. Make times there are no changes so it finished VERY fast and does not use much space.

Yes the idea of a "clone" is conceptually easy to understand. THAST is the ONLY good thing about it.

Clones do work if you have several hard drives. Every day you take out the new drive, make a clone then place the drive in a fire safe. If you have 5 or 10 hard dries this system works and is the way most professionals used to do backups years (decades) ago. They use a system where some of the drives are kept in a safe in a different building and work out a rotation scheme. This can work but you need to buy a half dozen disk drives. TM is cheaper and less work. But you still need an off-site backup too.

The one this can should never do is overwrite good backup data with new data.

 

[Fishrrman]

"Using a "clone" type software for backup is the worst advice. Never do that."

It's worked well enough for me, since "cloning software" was introduced for the Mac.

I've needed "external bootability" now and then, and time machine cannot do that (nor can any other backup other than cloning, to my knowledge).

Since I have several cloned backups, there are a couple of them that are (at any one time) a "few weeks back" in terms of what's on them. If I needed to "go back and get something", I suppose I'd have a chance at that.

But I almost never have to do that.

My "regular" backup is actually on TWO separate drives (I keep 4 partitions on my internal drive).
"Backup day" is either Saturday or Sunday.
Again, that's all I need.
Have been doing it this way for MANY years, and will keep doing it, as I don't have that "many years" left... (sigh)...