Working Off An External Thunderbolt Drive

[ansirone]

I just got an external thunderbolt ssd drive and was wondering if its fine to just work on PSD files straight form the drive. I also do a lot of AFX work as well. Just need to de-mystify the whole working-from-drive workflows.

 

[rfic]

I just got an external thunderbolt ssd drive and was wondering if its fine to just work on PSD files straight form the drive. I also do a lot of AFX work as well. Just need to de-mystify the whole working-from-drive workflows.

I plan to do similar thing, pls let us know how it works

 

[maflynn]

I'm rocking on an external SSD via USB, so the TB drive should be fine as well.

 

[fat jez]

My partner works entirely from a thunderbolt SSD. It's the boot disk for her 2012 21" iMac as the internal hard disk is too slow. What you are suggesting will be plenty fast enough.

 

[Fishrrman]

A Mac will boot and run just fine from ANY external drive that has a bootable copy of the MacOS on it.

Many people have been booting and running like this for years. I started 'way back in the 1980's.
Still doing it today with my late 2012 Mac Mini.

You'll have to get used to having TWO drive icons on your desktop, but that will take you all of a day or two.

I have a hard time understanding why folks get so confused over this issue.
I'll guess that it's not the same over in the "Windows world" … 🙂

 

[cat40]

I soon going to start up the Mac from external boot disk.

I doubt whether I will take Thunderbolt or USB3.

What about the snooze / sleep / hibernate problems can I expect? Is that the same as an internal drive?

 

[maflynn]

What about the snooze / sleep / hibernate problems can I expect? Is that the same as an internal drive?

I've incurred no issues with my iMac sleeping with it booting up from the external USB drive.

 

[bent christian]

I soon going to start up the Mac from external boot disk.

I doubt whether I will take Thunderbolt or USB3.

What about the snooze / sleep / hibernate problems can I expect? Is that the same as an internal drive?

What enclosure do you have? They are not all the same. I boot via Transcend Thunderbolt (also USB 3) at work (27", 2015), and the machine sometimes goes into recovery mode. I don't think the bus is detected early enough in the process. At home (21.5", 2015), I boot via Samsung Pro/Inatek USB 3 enclosure and never have that problem. USB 3 is also faster in benchmarking by about 100MB/Sec seq read/write. Everyday use of Adobe design applications show no appreciable difference, IMO. The down side to USB 3 is no TRIM. You really have to baby these drives. You cannot stress them. You will need to leave 20%-30% of free, unallocated space and give the drive time for garbage collection defrag writes and deletions for optimal performance. I am fine with USB 3, but there is a bit of a learning curve and it is not carefree.

 

[RPhoto]

I work with my entire Lightroom library stored on an external USB3 drive and have done so for a couple of years. No issues with sleeping etc. Essentially zero problems (famous last words).

 

[cat40]

Thanks for al your replies!

OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro mini USB3

This the one I want to buy with an samsung pro ssd 850 256GB or an evo 850 256.


Is TRIM really needed ?

In newer ssd it 's not noticeable?

 

[fat jez]

My advice would be (if possible) to get an enclosure that does Thunderbolt 2 and USB 3. Use whichever is fastest, but you get the option of TRIM if you discover you need it.