Connecting macbook to imac connect as external hard disk

[Ransz]

A friend of mine told me that I can connect the macbook 12inch to my late 2015 imac, and use it as an external hard drive of some sort.. Is this true / possible? Said it had something to donwith the usb c connection

 

[phillyboy82]

Yes, it is called target disk mode and I believe it is supported on the rMB. Hold down the "T" key during power up and you will eventually enable that feature; the rMB will then act as an external hard drive you can attach to the iMac with a USB-C to USB-A cable.

 

[Ransz]

Yes, it is called target disk mode and I believe it is supported on the rMB. Hold down the "T" key during power up and you will eventually enable that feature; the rMB will then act as an external hard drive you can attach to the iMac with a USB-C to USB-A cable.

Yay! Thank you so much for the answer . Lets say im editing a movie on final cut pro, can i transfer the project im working on to the rMB and unplug the rMB from the imac and continue working there?

 

[phillyboy82]

Sure, just make sure to drop it somewhere you will find it when you copy to the rMB. /Users/<username>/Desktop or the like.

The rMB really just looks like an external drive on your iMac when using target disk mode, but you will see the entire Macintosh HD drive from the rMB. You could probably just work and use the file off the rMB all the time, but read/write speeds would not be as good compared to doing it natively on the iMac's hard drive.

 

[Ransz]

i see, so basically there is no major benefit of using the rMB as an external drive... sounds more like an apple gimmick...
nothing special... just makes ur laptop a huge disk on key

 

[phillyboy82]

Oh no, it's very useful in the few situations that you would really want it . There is not really any advantage to doing so in your specific situation versus getting a USB drive.

Typically you do target disk mode when your Apple machine can't boot or you buy a new one and you want to use the transfer utility to get your data off of the old one. Put the old laptop in target disk mode, connect to the new device and then you can get your data off of it.

Very useful utility, and its a shame that Windows doesn't have anything equivalent.

 

[Ransz]

I see what u mean. Should have kept my 13 inch MBPr