Minimum hard drive requirements for external boot drive?

[funnyboy88]

I have a 2018 MacBook Pro and an external WD Passport 4TB USB-C Hard Drive (5 gbps speed).

I created a bootable clone of the Mac using SuperDuper, but when I boot into it, it is soooooooooo slowwwwwww. Like it takes 20 minutes to just load to the desktop and every user click takes several minutes to react to.

Is this hard drive not powerful enough to act a boot drive? What are the minimum requirements? Thank you!

 

[chabig]

Twenty minutes isn't normal. Assuming that you're not exaggerating, something is wrong, either with the cable or the drive. Try changing the cable, the drive, or plugging it into another port. If none of those help, I’d try reformatting the drive (HFS Extended, Journaled) and make a new clone.

 

[funnyboy88]

I’m giving up and buying an SSD. I reformatted the drive, changed ports, changed cables, and it is still molasses when trying to use as a boot drive.

So unless anyone knows otherwise, portable spinning disks external drives make for a horrible external booting experience!

 

[chabig]

You might even have had a failing drive. An SSD will make you happy.

 

[Boyd01]

So unless anyone knows otherwise, portable spinning disks external drives make for a horrible external booting experience!

I came to that same conclusion a number of years ago when I tried. But an external SSD works very well, I ran my 2012 quad-core Mini off a 1TB USB3 Samsung T3 for about three years and it worked perfectly, even for demanding things like Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro. That machine had an original Apple internal SSD and really the only difference I noticed was that it took about 30 seconds to boot instead of 15 seconds from the internal.

Now, the internal SSD's on newer Macs are much faster so you might notice more difference, depending on what kind of external SSD that you use and what you are doing. For example, the internal 2TB SSD on my 2018 Mini clocks around 2700 MB/sec while my external 2TB Samsung T7 is about 900 MB/sec and older Samsung T3 is only about 400 MB/sec

 

[Fishrrman]

Agree with chabig above.

Something could be wrong with the external you currently have.

You might consider a 2tb SSD in an external enclosure like this:

SABRENT 2.5 Inch SATA to USB 3.0 Tool Free External Hard Drive Enclosure [Optimized for SSD, Support UASP SATA III] Black (EC-UASP)

SABRENT 2.5 Inch SATA to USB 3.0 Tool Free External Hard Drive Enclosure [Optimized for SSD, Support UASP SATA III] Black (EC-UASP)

tinyurl.com

It should run MUCH faster.

 

[Boyd01]

I'd agree that twenty minutes is extreme, IIRC it took more like 5 minutes to boot from a bus-powered WD Passport drive on my 2013 MacBook Air.

 

[hobowankenobi]

One big variable is the OS and the associated file system. Are you running 10.15? APFS on hard drives is painful. SSD will solve that.

Not sure it would be 20 min painful...but being a clone could also be problematic, due to caching or other foundational design choices about how files system is optimized. I don't know, but it a hunch.

One way to test: wipe the external HD, and format HFS+. Do a clean install of 10.14 or older, and boot. How does the drive perform? If not reasonable....then yes, the drive, cable/bus is a possible issue. If performance is reasonable, I would chalk it up to an OS and file system optimized for SSD, not a hardware problem.