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cschmelz

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jun 6, 2007
348
113
I have a 2010 27" iMac that I've used for the last 3 years. i7, 12gb RAM and I've removed the optical drive and am using an SSD for the boot drive.

Great machine but I'd really like to add a thunderbolt DAS for both backup use (Time Machine) and some large volume media storage (photos, videos, etc)

I originally was leaning toward a high end machine with either 3tb fusion drive, i7, or a large SSD built in. However the fast TBolt storage options makes me think that going lower end refurb (say 8gb RAM 1tb hard drive i5) at $1500 makes more sense and then use the saved dollars to built an external 512gb SSD and use that as a boot drive for MacOS via Thunderbolt.

More options, cheaper and easier to replace should something fail than an internal drive. I could use the internal hard drive to mirror the boot drive and setup a small Boot Camp partition as well, then use the Drobo for mass storage.

This seem smart?
 
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