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garycurtis

macrumors 6502
Original poster
My late 2013 iMac (i5) is plenty fast for most of my needs. 1TB HDD. I wanted FD but the dealer didn't carry that model.

Am I opening a can of worms to think about an ext SSD such as the OWC elegato? This would be for the OS and applications only.

Some background: I always put my computer to sleep instead of powering down. Startup time isn't an issue.

Favorite application is Aperture.
 

Blue Sun

macrumors 6502a
Feb 11, 2009
984
330
Australia
I just did this exact thing. I purchased the LaCie 256GB rugged external SSD and I'm using it as a boot drive for OSX and all of my apps over Thunderbolt. The speeds are what you would expect of an internal SSD connected over SATA3. You can even enable TRIM when using Thunderbolt. I also sleep my machine and I haven't encountered an issue.

Suffice to say, I have been very impressed and I highly recommend this setup.
 

SaSaSushi

macrumors 601
Aug 8, 2007
4,156
553
Takamatsu, Japan
Do a search in these forums and you will come up with many threads like this.

I explained my own setup in the thread above and I am very pleased with it. The Thunderbolt enclosure I'm using seems to be $82.50 without a Thunderbolt cable now. An advantage of the enclosure I'm using over the bus-powered Seagate Thunderbolt Adapter sleds and Lacie Rugged drives are that it is AC powered. I recommend this for any SSD of 512GB or greater size, EVO or not. This is especially the case if you're booting the OS off the SSD.
 

garycurtis

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Hi, Mr. Sushi. We exchanged emails a half year ago. You are the guy on Shikoku Island, Japan. Right? I'm the guy who worked in Tokyo for years for Flying Tigers and FedEx.

I looked at the specs for that drive housing. Am I correct in believing that a regular Crucial 2.5 inch drive will mate up easily with the dock?

And also that the only difference with this dock is that it comes without the TB cable and that power is derived through its own wall-mounted power supply?

Thanks for your input. The experience, and thus the answers coming from forum members is shaped (and limited) by where they live. A lot of advice I heard is restricted by the supply channels where folks buy equipment. Glad to hear about this new source/supplier.

O Genki-de. Mata aimashoo.

Gary
 

DerekS

macrumors 6502
Jun 25, 2007
341
14
Just to throw my two cents in - I got a Lacie SSD Thunderbolt and I boot from it over Thunderbolt.

It is much faster than the 1TB Fusion the iMac has, and after I yanked the terrible fan it's dead silent. Very gruntled!
 

garycurtis

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Thanks Derek. Earlier today, my friend answered the same question via emai. He does technical stage production in Hollywood and Las Vegas and once worked for Apple and Adobe. I looked up the specs just now for LaCie TB drives. Very impressive, and prices have come down significantly since 2012.

But a clear-eyed look at my real needs, not just desires, dictates that I'll pass on SD for awhile. I have 2TB USB 3 ext drive for backups. BU only takes me 2:45 minutes done incrementally with SuperDuper.

Here is what my friend wrote:

You asked me about an SSD for your configuration before. I said that I didn't see the dollar to value ratio for you then. I still don't.

I have an internal 256 SSD. Yes, it's fast. But I have to store most of my data on an externals, because 256GB is just not big enough by a long shot. Therefore, other than boot times and proc speed, my data handling is limited by I/O which is a 1TB FW800 right now. I have 3 drives on that chain, for a total of about 4TB of storage, transferring at about 800MB a second on a good day. That's less than one-quarter of what a Thunderbolt drive can do.

So my SSD gets me 6 second boot times, and that's about it. Proc speed is more related to cache size for photos and video manipulation. Music doesn't care. So, big whoop. I can boot up in six ****ing seconds, but I hardly ever re-boot. These SSDs would have been a real blessing back when crashes had us rebooting 10 times a day. Now I do it once a week to clear system memory for security, and even then I sometimes forget. These machines are so stable now.

I think if you are happy with your rig, and have 8 gigs of RAM, your money is better spent on fast mass storage--a 1 or 2TB Thunderbolt drive for instance--and backup storage. If you are not backed up, you can loose everything in a millisecond. (backblaze.com is an excellent Mac only online backup service, BTW. They are secure, and FAST. Beats the socks off of Carbonite)

But hey, clearly you want an SSD. So get one.
 

SaSaSushi

macrumors 601
Aug 8, 2007
4,156
553
Takamatsu, Japan
Hi, Mr. Sushi. We exchanged emails a half year ago. You are the guy on Shikoku Island, Japan. Right? I'm the guy who worked in Tokyo for years for Flying Tigers and FedEx.

Hello again, Captain Curtis.

I looked at the specs for that drive housing. Am I correct in believing that a regular Crucial 2.5 inch drive will mate up easily with the dock?

You are indeed correct. Any 2.5" SSD or HDD will fit in the enclosure.

And also that the only difference with this dock is that it comes without the TB cable and that power is derived through its own wall-mounted power supply?

Yes, the Delock enclosure runs on AC. The Seagate Thunderbolt sleds and Lacie Ruggeds are bus-powered.

Thanks for your input. The experience, and thus the answers coming from forum members is shaped (and limited) by where they live. A lot of advice I heard is restricted by the supply channels where folks buy equipment. Glad to hear about this new source/supplier.

Aside from being a satisfied customer, I have no affiliation with the company but I did have some pleasant email exchanges with them before deciding to purchase the enclosure and they are attentive and prompt in their customer relations as well. As mentioned, they are a Taiwanese outfit.

O Genki-de. Mata aimashoo.

またね。
 

gazing

macrumors member
Apr 10, 2014
52
0
Interesting I'm looking for a ext ssd as well for booting . Referring to my thread : https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1725101/

Would the Lacie run windows 8 easily if I ripped out the drive and put my samsung in?

Also sasasushi would your delock enclosure work with Samsung ssd and what sorta speeds am I expecting with it?
Would it suffice for windows 8?
 

Vidivici

macrumors member
Oct 10, 2012
32
0
Europe
Just to throw my two cents in - I got a Lacie SSD Thunderbolt and I boot from it over Thunderbolt.

It is much faster than the 1TB Fusion the iMac has, and after I yanked the terrible fan it's dead silent. Very gruntled!


Fan ? I'm using the Lacie rugged TB als bootdrive myself. There is no fan inside

If you memtioned the 2 drive aluminium lacie ssd , than it could be correct. But its overkill to just use it as boot drive. The rugged will suffice more than enough.
 

hfg

macrumors 68040
Dec 1, 2006
3,621
312
Cedar Rapids, IA. USA
Interesting I'm looking for a ext ssd as well for booting . Referring to my thread : https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1725101/

Would the Lacie run windows 8 easily if I ripped out the drive and put my samsung in?

Also sasasushi would your delock enclosure work with Samsung ssd and what sorta speeds am I expecting with it?
Would it suffice for windows 8?

I have had great success booting Windows8 from the LaCie "Rugged" Thunderbolt enclosure (swapped hard disk for SSD). I have several Macs running this configuration.

I have not been able to get Windows booting from a single disk (unlinked RAID-0 pairing) in the "Little Big Disk". Wish I could so as to have a Windows boot SSD and Windows data hard disk in one Thunderbolt enclosure. So far, I have been unable to find any dual-drive Thunderbolt enclosure that will boot Windows externally on a Mac.
 
Last edited:

gazing

macrumors member
Apr 10, 2014
52
0
I have had great success booting Windows8 from the LaCie "Rugged" Thunderbolt enclosure (swapped hard disk for SSD). I have several Macs running this configuration.

I have not been able to get Windows booting from a single disk (unlinked RAID-0 pairing) in the "Little Big Disk". Wish I could so as to have a Windows boot SSD and Windows data hard disk in one Thunderbolt enclosure. So far, I have been unable to find any dual-drive Thunderbolt enclosure that will boot Windows externally on a Mac.

Hfg that's another I was thinking about .
What ssd did you put in and what speeds
 

hfg

macrumors 68040
Dec 1, 2006
3,621
312
Cedar Rapids, IA. USA
Hfg that's another I was thinking about .
What ssd did you put in and what speeds

I am using 256GB Samsung 840 Pro SSDs in mine at the moment. I tried a 512GB 840 Pro, and although it seemed fine on Thunderbolt, it was a bit flakey on USB 3.0 probably due to power requirements (and I didn't really stress it to the maximum). I have had problems with using Crucial M4 512GB SSDs in bus-powered Thunderbolt enclosures as well ... just too much power (spikes) required I suspect.

I purchased a retail LaCie "Rugged" 500GB SSD Thunderbolt and it has a 840 EVO SSD inside which is lower power technology (and slightly less performance), so it should work fine with either interface. I tried a Crucial M500 980GB SSD (also lower power technology) in the LaCie and it too was flakey, although it seems to work on the Seagate "GoFlex" bus-powered Thunderbolt interface. If you are going to use the really big SSDs, especially the older high-performance technology, you probably want to use a line-powered enclosure rather than relying on the bus-powered ones.

Both the Lacie "Rugged" and Seagate "GoFlex" Thunderbolt units seem to boot Windows fine on a Mac Mini or iMac for me.

Let us know what you end up using and your results...

-howard
 

gazing

macrumors member
Apr 10, 2014
52
0
I am using 256GB Samsung 840 Pro SSDs in mine at the moment. I tried a 512GB 840 Pro, and although it seemed fine on Thunderbolt, it was a bit flakey on USB 3.0 probably due to power requirements (and I didn't really stress it to the maximum). I have had problems with using Crucial M4 512GB SSDs in bus-powered Thunderbolt enclosures as well ... just too much power (spikes) required I suspect.

I purchased a retail LaCie "Rugged" 500GB SSD Thunderbolt and it has a 840 EVO SSD inside which is lower power technology (and slightly less performance), so it should work fine with either interface. I tried a Crucial M500 980GB SSD (also lower power technology) in the LaCie and it too was flakey, although it seems to work on the Seagate "GoFlex" bus-powered Thunderbolt interface. If you are going to use the really big SSDs, especially the older high-performance technology, you probably want to use a line-powered enclosure rather than relying on the bus-powered ones.


Both the Lacie "Rugged" and Seagate "GoFlex" Thunderbolt units seem to boot Windows fine on a Mac Mini or iMac for me.

Let us know what you end up using and your results...

-howard


Sure I will - just wondered if anyone had any info or ideas if I tried it but with the G-drive or Buffalo Ministation?
 

SaSaSushi

macrumors 601
Aug 8, 2007
4,156
553
Takamatsu, Japan
Also sasasushi would your delock enclosure work with Samsung ssd and what sorta speeds am I expecting with it?
Would it suffice for windows 8?

You can see benchmarks I did it with the Delock head to head against the $18 Inateck UASP USB3 enclosure in this thread.

I have the 512GB Samsung 840 EVO split evenly between OS X and Windows 7 BootCamp. Everything works perfectly.

----------

Also is windows bootable from USB 3 enclosure?!?

Windows will not boot from USB 3, not easily anyhow. I've read of some workarounds although I can't speak to them personally but I can tell you that when I was doing the above head to head comparison, while OS X booted in the USB 3 enclosure with no issues, I got a BSOD when attempting to boot to Windows.

Once I popped it back into the Delock, Windows booted up as usual.
 

smithrh

macrumors 68030
Feb 28, 2009
2,722
1,730
When it comes to AC vs. bus powered, I see AC as being another source of issues, another cord to have pulled out/fail, and so on.

What might I be missing? What's the allure of AC power?

My thought process is/was that if the TB connection is pulled out, you're screwed one way or the other - having power come from the TB bus is no extra issue.
 

hfg

macrumors 68040
Dec 1, 2006
3,621
312
Cedar Rapids, IA. USA
When it comes to AC vs. bus powered, I see AC as being another source of issues, another cord to have pulled out/fail, and so on.

What might I be missing? What's the allure of AC power?

My thought process is/was that if the TB connection is pulled out, you're screwed one way or the other - having power come from the TB bus is no extra issue.

Some of the larger (>512GB) older technology and higher performance SSDs draw too much current for the bus-powered enclosure and thus can "brick" the SSD or cause intermittent operation. Line powered enclosures don't have the power restrictions.
 

smithrh

macrumors 68030
Feb 28, 2009
2,722
1,730
Thanks - I hadn't equated bigger SSDs to larger current draw, but that makes perfect sense, there will be more NAND dies/chips on the larger drives...
 
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