External hard drive advice needed

[retta283]

I have a 2010 iMac that works perfectly other than a dead hard drive. Turns out the SATA is bad, no drives I install work, spent a lot of time tinkering with it and got nothing to work. I could try replacing the SATA but I don't trust myself to not mess it up more. I figure it'll be easier at this point to use it with an external drive. Currently I have it hooked up to a Firewire drive, but it requires its own power supply, making the 1 plug iMac into a 2 plug machine just to use it as a little streaming device.

This is really not ideal, the location I had the 2010 iMac is limited in terms of wall plugs/extension cord plugs so I'd like to find an external hard drive solution that does not require power from the mains. I know that you can get a USB 2 HDD for cheap, but I don't believe this can be used as a boot drive. FireWire would really be ideal, but everything I have/found requires AC power. Any suggestions?

 

[Ynk]

Any 2.5" USB Powered drive will work as a boot drive for MacOS (not windows/bootcamp without serious pain to get it set up). I used a 1TB Samsung T5 SSD portable drive on my 2013 iMac for years and it worked wonderfully.

The only slight catch is that it can sometimes be a little fussy about waking up from a deep sleep so I disabled that.

 

[mj_]

What about this: https://www.amazon.com/OWC-Mercury-Portable-USB3-0-Enclosure/dp/B00AR9ZYYQ

It's bus-powered, meaning that it should use the FireWire interface to power the drive (which, according to Apple, provides up to 7 W on your 2010 iMac). And if that doesn't work then maybe you can hook up an extra USB cable just for power. Although you will need to make sure it's a power-only USB cable, otherwise the drive might also use your iMac's much slower USB 2.0 interface for data transfer.

 

[retta283]

What about this: https://www.amazon.com/OWC-Mercury-Portable-USB3-0-Enclosure/dp/B00AR9ZYYQ

It's bus-powered, meaning that it should use the FireWire interface to power the drive (which, according to Apple, provides up to 7 W on your 2010 iMac). And if that doesn't work then maybe you can hook up an extra USB cable just for power. Although you will need to make sure it's a power-only USB cable, otherwise the drive might also use your iMac's much slower USB 2.0 interface for data transfer.

Exactly what I was looking for, thank you. From what I've read, using a FW800 7200rpm drive is actually quite acceptable on these older machines, people have said the difference in speed for casual use is hard to notice. USB 2.0 speeds would probably be okay for what I'm using the unit for, but FW800 would be amazing. I will definitely try this.