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kapalua12

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jun 20, 2010
300
1
United States
I know it will boot from a Backup made from Carbon Copy Cloner. Will the iMac also boot as well from a Thunderbolt drive?
What are the Pros and Cons of each setup?
 
What setups?

A clone to a Firewire 400 or 800 or USB 2.0 or 3.0 or Thunderbolt equipped external HDD will be as bootable as a Mac OS X install originally installed on such external HDD.

Or am I misunderstanding you?
 
I know it will boot from a Backup made from Carbon Copy Cloner. Will the iMac also boot as well from a Thunderbolt drive?
What are the Pros and Cons of each setup?

I'm not quite sure I understand what you're asking, but I'll tell you what I've done. I attached an external Thunderbolt enclosure (Buffalo) with an SSD inside. I then started SuperDuper! and had it create a clone of my internal Fusion boot drive onto the Thunderbolt drive. I then restarted my Mac and depressed the Option key while booting. I selected the external Thunderbolt drive and booted from it. Is that what you're asking?
 
Yes, exactly.

Thank you.

Are there any benefits to booting from Thunderbolt vs. USB 3 in the scenario you depicted?

I have a Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 external enclosure, both with Samsung 840 Pro SSDs. The Thunderbolt drive (Buffalo) uses a bit less CPU overhead, and the USB 3.0 drive (Firmtech) is a bit faster - all using benchmarks. However, in simply using the drives I cannot tell any difference. In other words, if I hadn't actually LOOKED for differences I could not tell you which drive was faster or which used more CPU power. The biggest difference, IMO, is that Thunderbolt drives support TRIM for SSDs and USB 3.0 doesn't.
 
Can i put an iso image of windows on an external HDD to use it to install through bootcamp ? It is possible?
 
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