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Racineur

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jun 11, 2013
628
205
Montréal, Québec
...Booting of course. Titles are not editable...
Allo friends. My old iMac 27 2013 i5 24 RAM runs fine with Mojave (smooth and fast but just enough) or Catalina (sudden restarts, freezes, not awaking from sleep) on external SSD's. For fun I booted from the internal 1.2 T Fusion drive with Mountain Lion and original apps of the 2010's. Wowowowow !!! Blazing fast. Everything is crazy fast. Mail, Firefox Legacy (then Safari not working), Aperture, Word, FileMaker Pro, Lightroom, iMovie, DxO Optics Pro, etc. All is about speed. Plus, Web sites in Firefox Legacy literally pop up nanosecond after "Enter". Not so with Mojave and Catalina. Iternet is turned into World Wide Wait. Question: Why is that so? Is it the Fusion Drive? Mountain Lion that needs less resources? Truly have me questioned if I could live à la 2013...Add the fact that my iMac is stuck on buggy Catalina so I find myself booting with Mojave most of the time. Fortunately, I kinda can live with that since I mostly do Web browsing, email, some Word and Photos.
 
It will be similarly fast on High Sierra.

On iMac 2013, external SSD drives communicate by USB 3.0 protocol; while internal SSD of your Fusion drive (while healthy) communicate by PCIe protocol, nearly 1.5 time the speed (comparing with USB 3.0) in theory, and not affected by the USB controller chip of the enclosure.
 
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