Booting from a thunderbolt drive possible?

[Zellio]

My newest iMac has a 3 tb drive. I have lots of steam and pc stuff, and I have a 1tb usb 3.0 external for storage, so the 1 tb partition for the mac is quite unused.

What if I got a 256-512 ssd and a thunderbolt connector and used it as a boot up drive for osx, and removed the osx partition? Would it be possible?

 

[WilliamG]

My newest iMac has a 3 tb drive. I have lots of steam and pc stuff, and I have a 1tb usb 3.0 external for storage, so the 1 tb partition for the mac is quite unused.

What if I got a 256-512 ssd and a thunderbolt connector and used it as a boot up drive for osx, and removed the osx partition? Would it be possible?

I've been booting off a Thunderbolt 256GB Samsung 830 SSD for well over a year now. Zero issues.

 

[Zellio]

Do you get full 830 speeds?

 

[sahni130]

I've been booting off a Thunderbolt 256GB Samsung 830 SSD for well over a year now. Zero issues.

Also, which enclosure are you using?

 

[WilliamG]

Do you get full 830 speeds?

No, but it's very fast: 360MB read, 325MB write, give or take. Blazing fast in any case.

Also, which enclosure are you using?

Seagate Backup Plus 2.5" enclosure.

This setup has not given me a single issue at any point. I actually have the fusion drive setup inside my 2012 iMac (1TB + 128GB SSD). The external Samsung 830 is my OS X disk, the 128GB internal SSD is my Windows 7 disk, and the 1TB internal disk is other data.