What to do with the 2 Thunderbolt 1 ports on 2011 iMac?

What I did when I had that model was purchase a Silicon Power 240GB TB external drive and ran that as the boot drive.

Streets faster than the old 7200rpm 1TB drive which was used for backups. Speed was incredible.

 

eGPU + monitor

 

@SnarkyBear I thought of getting a thunderbolt to USB 3 adaptor and linking it to a powered USB 3 hub. But I blanched when I saw the price of one of those adaptors.

 

The -BEST USE- for the thunderbolt port is to buy an SSD in a thunderbolt enclosure, and make it your boot drive.

Far, FAR faster than a built in platter-based HDD (assuming that's what you have now).

 

One TB port for external display and the other one for TB storage in RAID setup (daisy chain). Love it!

 

I have the 21.5" 2011 iMac. I have two thunderbolt devices, both of which I think were a good value to keep the computer more current as it has aged.

1. Caldiget thunderbolt dock. I used this to get USB 3.0 on my otherwise USB 2 computer. I was able to dump my FireWire drives (as they broke) and use cheaper more modern USB 3 devices. Note that the only restriction is that USB 3 drives cannot be boot devices.

I could have used a cheaper thunderbolt to USB, but not only were they not available at the time, but I also needed pass thru thunderbolt for my next device (as the smaller 21.5" iMac has only 1 thunderbolt port.)

2. Delock Thunderbolt enclosure with a ssd inside. This allows me to boot from an external ssd drive, so I was able to upgrade without opening up the iMac, and the new drive really increased the speed over the older spinning hard drive.