Samsung 970 EVO + as a boot drive?

[dcmaccam]

After trying my 2019 iMac 32GB with booting from a Lacie drive with a Samsung 500 GB SSD installed I went back to using the fusion drive for now. The reason was I felt the mac felt slightly faster doing things like Mail, Calendar, Browsing etc. (probably due to the SSD part of the Fusion drive). I use my Mac mainly for Lightroom and a bit of video editing using Premiere Elements.
Now my current setup for this is boot the Mac (32GB) from internal Fusion drive. I have a 1TB SSD Lacie Portable drive connected by USB C. This drive contains all my images,video files and swap/cache/preview files for Lightroom/Premiere Elements.

Now I had an idea to change this.
My thoughts were to purchase a Samsung 970 EVO Plus 1 TB PCIe NVMe M.2 (2280) put it in a USB 3.1 Gen 2 case just now and move it later to a Thunderbolt 3 case for maximum performance when funds permit.

I would then have the option of still running the Mac from the internal drive and moving all my data from the Lacie drive to the 970 EVO Plus providing quicker access photo/video files.

Or, set up the 970 EVO Plus as the boot drive and also move my data files there also.

Also any suggestions on what would be a suitable case for the 970 EVO (USB 3.1 Gen2. or Thunderbolt 3).

Any thoughts on what would a good route to take? Thanks.

 

[Fishrrman]

What kind of speeds are you getting using the internal fusion drive?
Download Blackmagic Speed Test, run it, post your results here.

USB3.1 gen2 will give you reads in the 900-950MBps range.

Be aware that these drives can get on the hot side if run "in heavy write mode" for an extended time.

I prefer drives OTHER THAN Samsung.
But perhaps that's just me.

 

[dcmaccam]

Using 5GB test Fusion does at first 850 Write 1000 Read
Second pass drops a bit and then with the next passes settles at about 180 Read 195 write.

When I had the Lacie mobile drive as boot it was around about 450 read 500 write if I remember correctly

I expected the drive would get hot but I was going to provide extra heatsinking by clamping the drive to the iMacs stand at the back out of sight. Any other drive you would recommend ?

Or would I be better to leave it running the Fusion drive and using the fast external drive to replace the Lacie drive?

 

[bsbeamer]

Make sure the Samsung 970 Evo Plus model has the absolute latest firmware. There was an issue with previous versions being incompatible with macOS across the board.

Standard Samsung 970 Evo (not Plus) never experienced this issue.

TB3 40Gbps NVMe adapter with 970 Evo on iMac19,1 usually gets around 1650MB/s write and 2500MB/s read in all speed tests. On par with built-in SSD's 1925MB/s write and 2000MB/s read.

 

[dcmaccam]

Any recommendations for a TB3 NVMe adapter?

 

[bsbeamer]

Any recommendations for a TB3 NVMe adapter?

This one works very well with iMac19,1 if you want true 40Gbps:

ORICO NVME Enclosure

ORICO NVME Enclosure

www.amazon.com

 

[honestone33]

I recently purchased this Samsung T7 1 TB SSD:

Portable SSD T7 USB 3.2 1TB (Gray) | Samsung US

www.samsung.com

Have not yet used it extensively, as I am waiting for a couple more of my critical third party apps to be compatible with Big Sur. My plan is to test Big Sur out on a partition on that SSD. For at least one other partition, I plan on copying Movies and TV Series to it. Actually, I might make 3 partitions: one for Big Sur, one for movies, and one for TV series. I guess if I did that now (excluding installing Big Sur on it), I could test how fast VLC is on my Mini when accessing either a movie or TV series on the SSD.

My late 2018 Mac Mini has 4 Thunderbolt 3 ports, and I actually Erased and Formatted that SSD via the Mini and one of those ports. Worked fine, but of course can't do any speed comparisons yet (I also connected it, via the supplied USB-B cable to my MacBook Air, and again all is well).