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Thunderbolt speed

dcmaccam said:
I have done it that way before, but I wondered if I just took a Time Machine backup of my boot drive and just did a restore to the ssd drive.
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Yeah, you can do that too.

In my experience, restoring from Time Machine is painfully slow, and in reality, is just an extra step since you can just migrate your data from your internal drive.

dcmaccam said:
But I don't know if this would work going to an ssd.
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Yeah, it works to an SSD too.

With a few exceptions, as long as the drive is formatted corrected, then you can install the OS on it.

I have made bootable drives from many different types of storage, HDD, SSD, thumb drive, external USB, external FireWire, external TB, I have even used iPods as boot drives.

So, just treat your external TB SSD the same way you would your internal drive, with the exception of enabling TRIM.
 
Remember dcmaccam the USB ports on youyr 2011 iMac are only USB2, too slow really for running an SSD from. Hunt the market to a Thunderbolt 1 drive, pop in the SSD of your selectection and connect, format Mac OS Extended (Journaled) in Disk utility and then download CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper and copy the internal drive to the SSD.

\Both are available as a trial for 30 days, however the registered versions are much faster, and imho far superior to Time Machine.

Into System Preferences and select the SSD as the boot drive and you are in business.
 
I don't think you need to 'enable TRIM', as on a Thunderbolt external drive it's enable automatically. That's how my TB3 WD Black NVMe shows up in Mojave and Catalina - I can't check it in High Sierra on the 2011 iMac at the moment.
 
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dcmaccam said:
Hi, I have a late 2011 iMac to which I have 2 Lacie Thurderbolt drives attached, a 1TB and a 2TB both contain 5400 RPM drives. Now I did a Blackmagic speed test on both drives the 2TB gives around 120Mbs Read / Write the 1TB gives around 60Mbs Read / Write.

Any idea why the big difference ?

The 2TB has 1 partition but the 1TB has 2 partitions one of which is used for time machine.

Also is there any cost effective way to connect the Thunderbolt port of this iMac to a Thunderbolt 3 drive?
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How many Thunderbolt ports does that iMac have?
 
Well I now have a 500GB Samsung EVO SSD mounted in one of my LaCie Thunderbolt drives. Did a quick test using Blackmagic speed test. and get about 340 to 350 Gbs when testing the bare drive. However I tried to enable Trim using sudo trimforce enable I get xxxxxxxxx is not in the sudoers file where the xxxxxxxxx is my username. Any idea how to fix this ? I was going to do a restore onto this drive from a backup so would have to do it again so I assume the problem would recur again. If I were to do a clean install and migrate would that solve the problem. Once again any help much appreciated.
 
What does About this Mac>System Report say about TRIM when you select the drive? Presumable its still found in the SATA Device Tree.
 
dcmaccam said:
Well I now have a 500GB Samsung EVO SSD mounted in one of my LaCie Thunderbolt drives. Did a quick test using Blackmagic speed test. and get about 340 to 350 Gbs when testing the bare drive. However I tried to enable Trim using sudo trimforce enable I get xxxxxxxxx is not in the sudoers file where the xxxxxxxxx is my username. Any idea how to fix this ? I was going to do a restore onto this drive from a backup so would have to do it again so I assume the problem would recur again. If I were to do a clean install and migrate would that solve the problem. Once again any help much appreciated.
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Is the account you're using an administrator account on the computer?
 
Yes it is, but solved the problem. I logon from a user account with admin privileges enabled. I logged on using the full Admin account and command worked. When I rebooted into my normal account it was shown as enabled. I think initially I will just do a restore from a backup onto this drive. But in the long run maybe a fresh install and a migrate would be better.

Any idea if I would get better than 348MB/s Write 386MB/s Read if I mounted the drive internally ?
 
dcmaccam said:
Any idea if I would get better than 348MB/s Write 386MB/s Read if I mounted the drive internally ?
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Yes, would be a little better. I think from a user perspective, the differences going from external to internal would be much less noticeable than going from internal HDD to external SSD.

I don't have my Mid-2011 iMac anymore, but on my Late 2011 MacBook Pro, which would have similar performance to your iMac, my internal SSD is 452MBps Write and 508MBps Read.

This is with a relatively lightly used SSD.
 
dcmaccam said:
Thanks for the info. I have done it that way before, but I wondered if I just took a Time Machine backup of my boot drive and just did a restore to the ssd drive. I have done this several times before with my existing boot drive. But I don't know if this would work going to an ssd. Good info on the TRIM support👍
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This is an interesting discussion, and there seems to be some confusion about drive speeds. First of all, I would stay away from LaCie gear, as they have some nice niche products, but cost a lot more. I know professional photographers for location work, but not for desktop use. SATA I=150MB/s, SATA II=300MB/s, and SATA III=600MB/s. The nominal 3.5" 7200 RPM HDD get about 150MB/s, BUT 5400 cuts that speed in half, and going from 3.5 to 2.5 halves it again. So, those LaCie HDDs should not get much better than 50MB/s. Instead, use a SATA SSD where your speed will be about 10X faster. That's still only half of the 1GB/s bandwidth with TB1. So please keep that in mind that my TB knowledge is from reading, not using. I have installed Thunderbays for clients, for fast external booting and storage. The OWC Thunderbays have 4 bays for 3.5 drives. (you can use 2.5 or 3.5 drives and they make them for only 2.5" drives.) He needed a lot of space, so we put in 4, 4TB WD Enterprise HDDs, but then added SoftRaid and created a RAID5. The actual speed of the disks in the Raid was just under 400MB/s reads., almost 3X faster than without the Raid. Also, if one drive dies, you continue working and order a replacement that automatically rebuilds itself. I have a similar setup on my cMP, using 5 HDDs in my SATA II bays, but get over 450MB/s reads. (almost as fast as an SSD)
However, the best way to have an external boot drive for your older iMac, is to use an NVMe blade like the Samsung 970. I installed one for a 21" iMac on the USB3 port. It got reads of 450MB/s which was plenty of speed for her office computer. Since those blades are capable of 3GB/s, I'm sure you could get a lot better speed with TB. Obviously, with TB1, you only get a max of 1GB/s. I would definitely suggest you compare that to any other solution. Hopefully, others who may have more TB experience will comment on this as well. Also, the external NVMe enclosure is about half the size of a SATA enclosure and start at about $25.
 
"Any idea if I would get better than 348MB/s Write 386MB/s Read if I mounted the drive internally ?"

I'd just "use it the way it is now"... and be happy...
 
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Yes that seems like a good idea, plus if I want to upgrade to a 1TB in the future its just 4 screws.

However as my iMac has been migrated couple of times plus a couple of upgrades over several versions of OS maybe time to do a fresh install and then a migration or a re-installation. With my stuff loaded I am using 260GB of the 500GB. Maybe this would get rid of some of the old stuff from my current installation
 
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