Basic Question thunderbolt question

You can, but you'll only get USB2 speeds from it... this is NOT a Thunderbolt drive...

You'll need to double your budget to get a thunderbolt-capable drive:

http://www.amazon.com/LaCie-Thunderbolt-Series-External-9000353/dp/B00AJJIUKO/

 

Try the WD Passport RAID drive for a combination of speed, capacity and portability

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=1240

 

OP closed original message with the comment:
[[ I want to free up my internal hard drive all together. iMac Performance is sluggish. ]]

Moving some files "off" may help, but chances are your internal drive has become heavily fragmented -- not just "file fragmentation", but "free space" fragmentation, as well.

There's a relatively easy way to clean all this up, but you'll need an external drive (other than your TM backup) with which to do this.

Process involves:
1. Use CarbonCopyCloner to create a BOOTABLE clone (of the contents of your internal) on the external drive
2. Boot from the cloned backup
3. Launch Disk Utility and re-initialize the internal drive (yes, re-initialize)
4. Now, use CCC to "clone back over" the contents of the cloned backup BACK TO the internal drive.

Why do this?
When the backup is "cloned back over", all the files will be written contiguously at "the head end" of the internal drive. When the process is complete, you'll have all the "free space" again re-concactenated together behind the data.

Don't be intimidated by doing this -- hardest part is waiting for the clone to complete, and then waiting the second time for the "re-clone" to complete.

Final thoughts about drives:
You might consider something like a USB3/SATA docking station instead of a "standalone" external drive. It's like a toaster in which you can insert drives (as you would bread). Makes it easy to swap a second or third drive around. Also useful if you acquire a "bare" drive from someplace.