Booting Thunderbolt iMac from LaCie Rugged SSD

I'm about to take the plunge and get the seagate adapter, no one is having any issues using this with a 256gb SSD as the boot drive, disconnects, not coming out of sleep, etc?

Lots of different opinions, not sure whether to get the lacie or the seagate, any thoughts here?

Dana

Dduval said:

I'm about to take the plunge and get the seagate adapter, no one is having any issues using this with a 256gb SSD as the boot drive, disconnects, not coming out of sleep, etc?

Lots of different opinions, not sure whether to get the lacie or the seagate, any thoughts here?

Dana

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With my Seagate Backup Plus Thunderbolt with the Samsung 830 256GB SSD, I've had no issues, disconnects, not coming out of sleep etc with my 2012 27" iMac. So take that for what it's worth.

WilliamG said:

With my Seagate Backup Plus Thunderbolt with the Samsung 830 256GB SSD, I've had no issues, disconnects, not coming out of sleep etc with my 2012 27" iMac. So take that for what it's worth.

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Thank you...

I assume you have the stae121, correct?

Also, what is the difference between stae121 here...
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/search?Ntt=stae121&N=0&InitialSearch=yes&sts=ta

And the stae128 here...
http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Portable-Thunderbolt-Adapter-STAE128/dp/B009HQCARY/ref=dp_ob_title_ce

Looks the same, but I don't understand the different part numbers...?

The GoFlex is the old model. I have no idea how well that will work. I have the Seagate Backup Plus (second link).

WilliamG said:

The GoFlex is the old model. I have no idea how well that will work. I have the Seagate Backup Plus (second link).

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Thanks so much! Appreciate your time.

Dana

Dduval said:

Thanks so much! Appreciate your time.

Dana

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I believe they are in fact identical and just for different markets.

I've got the 128 connected to a Samsung 840 Pro 256Gb and not had a single issue for 3 weeks, I never let my Mac sleep though.

For the first few days I did let it sleep and never had an issue waking up.

5piN said:

I believe they are in fact identical and just for different markets.

I've got the 128 connected to a Samsung 840 Pro 256Gb and not had a single issue for 3 weeks, I never let my Mac sleep though.

For the first few days I did let it sleep and never had an issue waking up.

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As your boot drive, correct?

Dana

Dduval said:

As your boot drive, correct?

Dana

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Yea that's right! ...

Got my first problem. There where some firmware update and some instruments for garageband available on the app store which i downloaded. When the computer rebooted it didnt seem to find the ssd. Or really the ssd didnt even power on. Rebooted manually and it worked.

Wierd.

I posted this question in the windows section to no avail...

I searched and could not find an answer. I currently have boot camp, win 7 installed and mountain lion on my main internal drive.

I plan on adding an external thunderbolt ssd and using this as my osx boot drive.

My question is do I need to remove boot camp from my main internal hard drive? Once I get the external ssd setup, I'm just going to use the internal for storage...

Wasn't sure if I could still boot into win 7 (on internal drive) with osx on an external drive...?

Thanks in advance...

Dduval said:

I posted this question in the windows section to no avail...

I searched and could not find an answer. I currently have boot camp, win 7 installed and mountain lion on my main internal drive.

I plan on adding an external thunderbolt ssd and using this as my osx boot drive.

My question is do I need to remove boot camp from my main internal hard drive? Once I get the external ssd setup, I'm just going to use the internal for storage...

Wasn't sure if I could still boot into win 7 (on internal drive) with osx on an external drive...?

Thanks in advance...

Click to expand...

Anyone?

Dduval said:

Anyone?

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I didn't try it myself but in theory you should have no issues booting into Win 7 if set as your target drive by holding option key at boot.

pizzapappa said:

Got my first problem. There where some firmware update and some instruments for garageband available on the app store which i downloaded. When the computer rebooted it didnt seem to find the ssd. Or really the ssd didnt even power on. Rebooted manually and it worked.

Wierd.

Click to expand...

That doesn't sound promising... Keep us posted if it happens again.

Well, now im not that sure that the imac goes in to sleep when I press the button to do so. The screen goes black, fine but I have pled media server running in the background and I can still find and watch my movies from my iPhone even after that the imac is "sleeping".

Is that due to the external boot-drive or is it some setting?

Has anyone successfully changed the ssd in the lacie rugged enclosure to a faster one, and if so. What speeds did you get?

shelt said:

Just an FYI regarding booting my mid-2011 27" i7 from the new 256GB LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt SSD. In short, it works perfectly so far, and no surgery required (edit; 1 month - rock solid through may sleep cycles...). It wakes from sleep without issues. I now used SuperDuper to mirror the SSD to the old HD boot partition once a week (in addition to TM and my other backups...). I'll report back periodically with updates.

Blackmagic 1GB: W 250 MB/s R 378 MB/s (HDD ~90 and 95)

Boot Time to Login: 19.4s (was 90.1s with HDD)
Lightroom 4.2: 4.1s (was 14.7s)
Parallels XP Boot: 9.4s (was 45.8s)
iPhoto: 4.7s (was 14.7s)
Photoshop Load: 5.3s (was 12.7s)


While not as fast as a best in class internal 6GB SATA3 SSD, it's certainly an easy way to move to an SSD environment. I just rubber banded the drive to the back of my iMac after removing the orange bumper. No power required.

If stable, this is a cheaper and more compact external 256GB option than the GoFlex STAE122 + SSD + cable combo (~$420). The LaCie is $349 including the TB and USB3 cables.

Image

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I want to do this to my 2011 i5 iMac. Will this void my Apple warranty ? Is it difficult to move the boot drive to the SSD?

I'm going to buy the Lacie 120 SSD. Is faster than the Goflex Thunderbolt adapter + another ssd?

Are there any freeze problems during stop? Thanks

Apple Fan 21 said:

I want to do this to my 2011 i5 iMac. Will this void my Apple warranty ? Is it difficult to move the boot drive to the SSD?

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If you have a Thunderbolt port on your iMac, it will not void your Apple warranty by attaching a external disk drive to it. You would then copy (clone) your internal drive data to the external SSD drive using the built in OS X Disk Utility "Restore" function, or a cloning program such as CarbonCopyCloner (CCC).

Once the data is copied, you then change the "Startup Disk" in System Preferences to always boot from the external drive. Once you are sure everything is OK with the SSD boot disk, you can re-use the internal disk drive as you desire.

Icaras said:

I did not know you could remove that ugly orange case around it. That looks much better without it. But seriously, get a Twelve South backpack for a more proper hard drive mount on the back

Thanks for posting this. I think I may definitely look into this now.

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Icaras... thank you soo much for mentioning the Twelve South backpack!

I had the same idea as the original poster, in that I wanted to boot from a TB external drive with SSD but tuck it away hidden behind the stand with some elastic bands (not very elegant!)

This is much slicker and much more in tune with the iMac design

Thanks

Win 7 on external LaCie rugged thunderbolt SSD-Working

I can confirm the listed configuration works without flaws on 2012 27inch iMac

What you'll need:
LaCie Rugged SSD (comes with thunderbolt cable)
Copy of windows 7
Winclone 3


How I got it to work, on 27 inch 2012 iMac without CD rom use.
1. Make a Windows 7 ISO bootable thumb drive via bootcamp assistant
2. Format the LaCie Rugged as fat 32 via disk utility. Make sure it's bootable under advanced option.
3. Partition internal drive for bootcamp
4. Using bootcamp assistant instal windows 7 on the internal partition
5. While working in the new windows 7 partition install the LaCie thunderbolt drivers from their website.
6 . Update windows 7
7. Boot back into Mac OS X Mountain Lion
8. Use Winclone to copy the internal partition to the SSD. leave the original bootcamp on the internal drive for now.
9. Reboot holding down option. You will now see Mac OS X and 2 windows partitions. The second one is the external SSD. Select it.
10. On first boot windows crashes and asks for repair, allow it to repair. Then it will boot into Windows 7 on external Lacie Rugged SSD without problems.
11. Restart back into Mac OS X and using the bootcamp assistant delete the bootcamp partition.

In the end you'll have your internal fusion drive (in my case) all for the Mac and an external thunderbolt SSD for Windows 7 that functions just like a regular bootcamp does. This has been a stable set up for me for about a month, without problems.

Here is another thread about directly installing Windows on an external Thunderbolt SSD:

Installing Windows 8 on an External SSD Guide
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1508618/

Knuckleheadz said:

Icaras... thank you soo much for mentioning the Twelve South backpack!

I had the same idea as the original poster, in that I wanted to boot from a TB external drive with SSD but tuck it away hidden behind the stand with some elastic bands (not very elegant!)

This is much slicker and much more in tune with the iMac design

Thanks

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Definitely! No problem. I agree that it is much slicker.

You also might want to take a look at another similar new product from another accessory maker, Just-Mobile. It's called the AluRack and is basically the competing product of BackPack.

http://www.just-mobile.com/mac/alurack-1.html

However, the rugged hard drive from Lacie is pretty thick, so not sure if that would fit in the AluRack (the new Lacie Porsche Slim SSD would). It's also double the price.

Anyway, just thought I'd throw that out there.

Icaras said:

Definitely! No problem. I agree that it is much slicker.

You also might want to take a look at another similar new product from another accessory maker, Just-Mobile. It's called the AluRack and is basically the competing product of BackPack.

http://www.just-mobile.com/mac/alurack-1.html

However, the rugged hard drive from Lacie is pretty thick, so not sure if that would fit in the AluRack (the new Lacie Porsche Slim SSD would). It's also double the price.

Anyway, just thought I'd throw that out there.

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thanks for the alternative but it's a Twelve South backpack all the way

Cheers
Jon

loscamos said:

I'm going to buy the Lacie 120 SSD. Is faster than the Goflex Thunderbolt adapter + another ssd?

Are there any freeze problems during stop? Thanks

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Anyone? Someone say that lacie is faster some other that seagate it's faster. Sorry for my bad english

loscamos said:

Anyone? Someone say that lacie is faster some other that seagate it's faster. Sorry for my bad english

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The seagate is faster depending on what ssd you use with it.