Worth transferring OS into SSD?

[piotrrcola]

I've seen variations of this question a few times on the forum and was wondering what the latest options for me are.

I have a 27" mid 2017 iMac with a 1TB fusion drive used for YouTube, word processing, Powerpoint, Outlook, Spotify, moderate to heavy web browsing (e.g. 15-20 tabs), discord, slack etc. RAM is the only thing upgradeable and I'm running on 16gb with a page-ins to page-outs at 300:2 (i.e. don't think I need more RAM).

Nagging suspicion is that the fusion drive is holding back how fast things load and I should have gotten a SSD then (mildly regretting it now).

Blackmagic Speed Test results - maxes out around 500-600MB/s but sometimes as low as 70-100 MB/s (not sure what that's about).

Am I going to see significant real world performance increases by loading everything on an external SSD? My 'workaround' solution right now is just to keep every single program I use open. If so - what's the best schema that people have come up with so far? I am more than happy with a 512GB drive and can use my slow fusion drive for storage.

 

[Juicy Box]

Apple nerfed the SSD portion of the 1TB Fusion Drive back in 2015 to an undersized, tiny 24GB. This was down from 128GB from the 2012-2014 1TB Fusion Drives.

Apple decided that the 1TB Fusion Drives needed a little bit more SSD to it, and put a 32GB SSD in the 2017 iMac. Still a tiny SSD.


The point it, while you have a Fusion Drive, you are barely working with a SSD.

The Fusion Drives with the larger SSD tend to perform a lot better.

Am I going to see significant real world performance increases by loading everything on an external SSD?

Most likely. I would give it a try.

You didn't mention what OS you are on, but APFS and HDDs (including Fusion Drives) do not mix. There is a performance decrease just by using APFS. This performance decrease before even worse with Catalina for some reason.

If you are using Catalina (not sure about Big Sur), then your drive performance is probably really suffering.

With the prices of SSDs dropping, I would give it a try. I am sure you would see a significant performance increase, but especially so if you your Fusion Dirve is in APFS.

 

[piotrrcola]

@vertical smile

I just upgraded to Big Sur so yes my fusion drive is running APFS, looking for something just a bit more snappier.

What kind of external SSD hardware is best to get here? Samsung X5? T7? Enclosure + m.2 NVME SSD? Seems like there are a ton of options but I'd rather just pick one that will stretch this iMac out another 4-5 years (I'd be ok with another 2-3 too)

 

[Juicy Box]

What kind of external SSD hardware is best to get here? Samsung X5? T7? Enclosure + m.2 NVME SSD?

There are a bunch of options, all with pros and cons. I am assuming you just want external options here, as there are good internal options as well.

I am currently using the Samsung X5 over TB1 on my Late 2012 iMac, and have had good experiences with it. I get speeds of almost 900MBps on it, which is pretty fast on my iMac. You would probably see speeds close to 3000MBps on your iMac with TB3. It has TRIM support, and of course the speed. The biggest downside is the price. I got a really good deal on a 500Gb X5, opened it up, and put a 1TB 970 EVO Plus NVMe inside. This saved me some money.

Getting a TB3 NVMe enclosure and a NVMe SSD to put in it would save some money over the X5. Of course, this would still be more expensive over the USB options. The upside would be the super fast speed and TRIM support. There isn't a whole lot of choices out there for the TB3 enclosures, but there are some that have decent reviews.

T7 might be a good balance of price and speed. You would probably see about 900MBps on the T7. All around good choice, especially if you can find a deal. A downside to consider about the T7 is that there is no TRIM support for USB drive on the MacOS (not sure if this has changed with Big Sur).

A USB3.2 Gen2 NVMe enclosure and a NVMe SSD to use in it would save some money over the T7. I recently saw a New Egg special for an $84 Crucial 1TB NVMe SSD. It may have been 1 day special, but the prices are dropping.

You could also get a SATA SSD, but I wouldn't bother. The prices are dropping on the NVMe SSDs, and you can take advantage of the faster TB3/USB3.2 Gen2, so I would if I were you.

There are some other options, such as striping RAIDs and high speed SD cards, but I think either a TB NVMe or USB3.2 Gen2 NVMe would be good choices for your Mac.

I'd rather just pick one that will stretch this iMac out another 4-5 years (I'd be ok with another 2-3 too)

You would still have your internal Fusion Drive. You could use this as a bootable back up of your external drive, or additional storage.

You could use the Fusion for old OS versions, like High Sierra, when HDDs ran well on MacOS for example.

You could de-fuse the drive, and use the very fast, but small SSD portion as a scratch disk, and use the HDD portion as a back up, storage, nothing, etc.

But no matter what you decide to do, I highly recommend keeping at least one back up, preferably a bootable one.

 

[piotrrcola]

Thanks for your help.

Final question - thinking about getting a Samsung 970 Pro and this:

Thunderbolt 3 SSD Enclosure, WAVLINK Thunderbolt 3 to PCIE NVMe M.2 Portable External SSD Enclosure for Single Sided Drives, Thunderbolt 3 Cable Included

Thunderbolt 3 SSD Enclosure, WAVLINK Thunderbolt 3 to PCIE NVMe M.2 Portable External SSD Enclosure for Single Sided Drives, Thunderbolt 3 Cable Included

www.amazon.com

Some other enclosures (TB3) are posting speeds of <1GBps with m.2 NVME SSDs - why is this the case when people are able to get >2GBps with this one?

 

[Juicy Box]

Some other enclosures (TB3) are posting speeds of <1GBps with m.2 NVME SSDs - why is this the case when people are able to get >2GBps with this one?

Could you post some of the other ones that you are referring to? It would be much easier to look and see the difference than just guess the difference.

My guess is that the other ones with slower speed are actually the USB3.2 Gen2 specification using the USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 port.

Either that or maybe the number PCIe lanes.

 

[Fishrrman]

Vertical smile wrote:
"T7 might be a good balance of price and speed. You would probably see about 900MBps on the T7. All around good choice, especially if you can find a deal. A downside to consider about the T7 is that there is no TRIM support for USB drive on the MacOS (not sure if this has changed with Big Sur).
A USB3.2 Gen2 NVMe enclosure and a NVMe SSD to use in it would save some money over the T7. I recently saw a New Egg special for an $84 Crucial 1TB NVMe SSD. It may have been 1 day special, but the prices are dropping."

This is what I'd recommend, too.

Either get a "put-together, ready-to-use" USB3.1 gen2 drive like the Samsung T7
or...
Get a "bare" nvme blade SSD, and a USB3.1 gen2 enclosure, and "put it together yourself" (literally "a snap" with most of them).

If you get a 1tb SSD, "making the move" from the internal fusion drive to the external SSD is also "child's play".
Just download CarbonCopyCloner from here:

Download CCC | Bombich Software

www.bombich.com

CCC is FREE to download and use for 30 days, so this costs you nothing.

Then, use CCC to clone the contents of the fusion drive to the SSD.
Then, go to the startup disk preference pane and set the SSD to become the new boot drive.
Then, reboot.

That's about all there is to it.

 

[piotrrcola]

@vertical smile I think you're right they advertise thunderbolt 3 but are actually on USB3.2 Gen2. I want to future proof as much as possible so I'll probably get that enclosure I posted above along with a a nvme blade ssd and be done with it.