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ravinder08

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jun 11, 2010
379
91
Whilst I'm waiting on the Apple Silicon iMacs to arrive I was considering buying a SSD external drive for a performance boost to my late 2012 27" iMac, as it's an older iMac will I gain any notice benefit from buying the Samsung T7 SSD compared to the T5?
 
No you won’t. The T7 is USB 3.2 Gen 2 and so it is faster, but your iMac won’t recognize that extra speed because it’s Gen 1. That said, the prices are basically the same (assuming you can even get the T5 in stock), so I’d go with whatever is cheaper/more available.
 
👆What she said. 😄

The T7 would be better if you expect to upgrade to a newer computer anytime soon.
 
If you're thinking or getting advantage of Gen2 in the near future i'd suggest taking a look at the Sandisk Extreme Pro (make sure you get the pro version as it looks as non Pro version), quite robust in terms of performance and priced more or less the same.
 
Thank you for the recommendation of the Crucial X8 would I get the extra speed As my Late 2012 iMac has a gen 1 thunderbolt port? The T5 is £142 in the UK and the X8 is £152.
 
I think the speed will be about the same as the t5, it’s limited to the usb 3.0 interface on your 2012 imac.

1 TB X8 is only 125€ on the german amazon store.
 
Be careful with the X8 , i had it on my list but it's got some performance issues with the write cache, after some time the speed drops heavily and you have to wait for the unit to recover. Not so good in terms of performance.

You won't be getting the benefits of the speed with your present iMac , but if you plan using it in the future when the AS arrive it will be a better investment.

Or you can instead go for a not so high model so when the AS arrive the technology will be more affordable.
 
Be careful with the X8 , i had it on my list but it's got some performance issues with the write cache, after some time the speed drops heavily and you have to wait for the unit to recover.

From the reviews I read this bottle neck only happens with very big files. If I remember right the cache fills up when you write a file larger than 160GB in one go on the X8 with 1TB capacity. I think this is never a problem with normal usage such as booting from the drive.
 
Yes, i couldn't remember exact details , i thought it was after writing certain amount of Gbs the speed would drop until the cache would clean, but didn't remember if it was in one file or just the amount of data.
Crucial usually is a good value for money option so probably not a bad choice.
When i looked at different models i had Crucial X8, Sandisk Extreme Pro and Samsungs T5 & T7.
Finally went for the Sandisk but Crucial was my initial option.
 
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