Hard Drive for Mac and PC Both - iMac 2011 High Sierra, Windows 10

[kstars]

Hard Drive for Mac and PC Both - iMac 2011 High Sierra, Windows 10.

I have a Cintiq Companion 2 from Wacom. It is a Windows machine with Windows 10. I want to transfer data from that to an external hard drive which will then connect to an iMac 2011 with High Sierra (very slow machine at this point.)

I am really upset that all the qualifying HD's I have found on Amazon may be affordable but they have horrible reviews. People are saying recently that they are just up and quitting. I am willing to spend a bit more. Please someone tell me what to get.

The Seagate 2 TB portable Slim HD USB 3.0 is not cutting it on Amazon. I have had 2 Seagate HD's for many years - same model, but from 7 years ago. One still works! What is up with that, and what do I buy?

Thank you!

 

[nambuccaheadsau]

Sounds like the 2011 iMac has a platter drive which now are as slow as molasses.

Give away platter drives and get an SSD and your Mac does not have USB3 alas and it will also be too slow. When I had that model I used a Silicon Power Thunderbolt SSD as the external boot drive. High Sierra will require a complete new install on an external SSD as it will have to format to APFS.

What you propose with Windows will not work either. Macs do not use BIOS so an external drive will not boot on your iMac. Get a large enough SSD, say 512GB, to install a Windows partition via BootCamp. You may need another version of Windows as Microsoft will not allow activation on two machines.

How much memory is installed? Suggest you need a minimum of 8GB. Sorry to be negative but alas the 2011 iMac just missed the bus for faster graphics, USB3 and other features and is showing its age.

 

[tillsbury]

Definitely an SSD. Spinning hard drives are for Time Machine backup and RAID arrays only, and shouldn't have been supplied as primary drives in computers for almost a decade.

As big as you can afford. At least 512Gb, then you can afford a Bootcamp partition if you need it. Larger if you can. Make sure that the drive is separable from the caddy and so in the future you can take the drive and put it in a TB3 or other quicker interface.

 

[kstars]

Sounds like the 2011 iMac has a platter drive which now are as slow as molasses.

Give away platter drives and get an SSD and your Mac does not have USB3 alas and it will also be too slow. When I had that model I used a Silicon Power Thunderbolt SSD as the external boot drive. High Sierra will require a complete new install on an external SSD as it will have to format to APFS.

What you propose with Windows will not work either. Macs do not use BIOS so an external drive will not boot on your iMac. Get a large enough SSD, say 512GB, to install a Windows partition via BootCamp. You may need another version of Windows as Microsoft will not allow activation on two machines.

How much memory is installed? Suggest you need a minimum of 8GB. Sorry to be negative but alas the 2011 iMac just missed the bus for faster graphics, USB3 and other features and is showing its age.

I am so sorry that I don't know what an SSD is, and my computer cannot handle bootcamp. How can I store 1 terabyte between mac and windows? SD cards are all I know about other than hard drives for storage. I have much info on Dropbox, but my computer cannot take the download. I want it stored, and if you can help me free up my computer slowdown too, just tell me again and I will ask my son to decipher:=) Thanks a lot! There is a lot of memory and lots of hard drive space. 2.8 GHz intel core i7, AMD Radeon HD 6770 M 512 MB - souped up. All of my computers slow down. I have a lot of graphics-intensive software if that matters. They are slow-loading, but work pretty good. I had bootcamp once but it was SLOW. Thank you
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Definitely an SSD. Spinning hard drives are for Time Machine backup and RAID arrays only, and shouldn't have been supplied as primary drives in computers for almost a decade.

As big as you can afford. At least 512Gb, then you can afford a Bootcamp partition if you need it. Larger if you can. Make sure that the drive is separable from the caddy and so in the future you can take the drive and put it in a TB3 or other quicker interface.

I am so sorry that I don't know what an SSD is, and my computer cannot handle bootcamp. How can I store 1 terabyte between mac and windows? SD cards are all I know about other than hard drives for storage. I have much info on Dropbox, but my computer cannot take the download. I want it stored, and if you can help me free up my computer slowdown too, just tell me again and I will ask my son to decipher:=) Thanks a lot! There is a lot of memory and lots of hard drive space. 2.8 GHz intel core i7, AMD Radeon HD 6770 M 512 MB - souped up. All of my computers slow down. I have a lot of graphics-intensive software if that matters. They are slow-loading, but work pretty good. I had bootcamp once but it was SLOW. Thank you

 

[nambuccaheadsau]

1. A solid state drive.

2. yes your computer can handle BootCamp.

 

[tillsbury]

Sorry.

Yes, Solid State Drive is what you need (searching for SSD will help you).

The point is, you have a very old computer and while it would be worth spending money to speed it up, you want to make sure that that money is not rendered useless when you finally decide to upgrade your machine in the future.

Thus, if you were to get a 512Gb or 1Tb SSD and mount it in an external chassis (such as that suggested by the poster above, with Thunderbolt), you could dramatically speed up your existing computer by booting and almost exclusively using that drive for both your Mac and (when running Bootcamp) Windows on the same machine. But although that is not a particularly cheap option, it does mean that in the future you can think about buying a more up-to-date iMac (with faster graphics, memory, ports, GPU and so on) knowing that you can plug your fast SSD drive into the new machine and still get good use from it.

 

[kstars]

Sorry.

Yes, Solid State Drive is what you need (searching for SSD will help you).

The point is, you have a very old computer and while it would be worth spending money to speed it up, you want to make sure that that money is not rendered useless when you finally decide to upgrade your machine in the future.

Thus, if you were to get a 512Gb or 1Tb SSD and mount it in an external chassis (such as that suggested by the poster above, with Thunderbolt), you could dramatically speed up your existing computer by booting and almost exclusively using that drive for both your Mac and (when running Bootcamp) Windows on the same machine. But although that is not a particularly cheap option, it does mean that in the future you can think about buying a more up-to-date iMac (with faster graphics, memory, ports, GPU and so on) knowing that you can plug your fast SSD drive into the new machine and still get good use from it.

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Thank you. I will seriously consider this. Will I be able to transfer data from one mac to a separate windows pc? Is there any extra formatting necessary? Not plug n play? Thank you