2014 mac mini boot from SD drive?

[APPLENEWBIE]

I bought a 2014 Mac Mini with spinning hard drive a couple years ago... dog slow. painfully slow. unusable. I have been running it mostly from an external USB3 SSD boot drive which is pretty fast, much better than the hard drive was.

Question: Would it be possible/efficient to run it from an SD card - SDXC (Secure Digital Extended Capacity) drive? The specs say it will accept 32 gb and larger cards in that slot. Anyone have an idea if that is worth doing? A 128 gb SDXC card is about $67 from Amazon.

Thanks!

 

[Boyd01]

Check the speed of the SD card you are considering, they are usually much slower than hard drives. For example, the 5400 RPM mini hard drive has a write speed of about 100MB/sec and you know how slow that feels.

 

[APPLENEWBIE]

Check the speed of the SD card you are considering, they are usually much slower than hard drives. For example, the 5400 RPM mini hard drive has a write speed of about 100MB/sec and you know how slow that feels.

Thanks. It looks like they are rated at about 50MBs... so... not good.

I probably should bite the bullet and swap a new ssd internally.. kinda scary process though

 

[Boyd01]

Why not just continue using the external SSD? That's what I do on my 2012 Mini with a 1TB Samsung T3 SSD, I use this machine exclusively for video editing and it is very fast.

 

[PhyreMe]

Thanks. It looks like they are rated at about 50MBs... so... not good.

I probably should bite the bullet and swap a new ssd internally.. kinda scary process though

Here's the performance difference between a USAP USB3 cable and internally putting the same SSD in the device (and in both cases, booting off the HDD to get a clear performance indication).

You decide if that's enough significance for you. Note the 860 is limited by SATA3 interface sadly.