want to boot my imac from an external ssd - best options

snow patrol

snow patrol

snow patrol

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hi all,

as title really. I'm getting a bit tired of the slight sluggishness of old fashioned hard drives. I'm pondering getting a large (ish) capacity ssd for my boot drive. I have a 2011 27" imac so even if i wanted to open it up (which i don't), i'd have the problems with fan noise once you tamper with the drive.

The current hd is 1tb but i'm only using about 650 and a lot of that is probably junk and clutter that needs to be deleted. I could PROBABLY make do with a 500gig drive as my boot drive and still have all my apps on it.

So what are my best options? A 500gig ssd with a thunderbolt caddy and cable? Or a ready made thunderbolt ssd? USB? (like this one: https://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-195-SA&groupid=701&catid=2104&subcat=2974)?

has anyone done this?
 
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Either option will work well and be significantly faster than your mechanical drive.
 
thanks,

the lacie 500gb option looks tempting as it's an all in one package and i wouldn't have to get anything else. So would it be a case plugging it in whilst booted into my current imac os, then installing yosemite onto the ssd, setting it as a boot drive, restarting and using migration assistant to move apps?

or could i just plug it in and ghost my current internal drive to the ssd?
 
I just used carbon copy cloner saved having to reinstall OS etc.

A usb 3 enclosure also worked with a crucial M4. Getting similar speeds and only cost £15.
 
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guttingly, my imac doesn't have usb 3 so i guess i'm forced down the more expensive route. Thunderbolt enclosures seem very expensive. I'd love to get a 1tb option but it just seems so pricey :(
 
hmmn, i could use a thunderbolt to esata adaptor (still rather pricey, but cheaper than an enclosure) and just have the drive bare..any issues with that?
 
Carbon Copy Cloner and it's a piece of cake. Since you're booting from an external drive, check out one of the various bootloaders such as rEFIt which will make it easy to chose between disks to boot from (plus its free and very easy).

If you're not using the internal disk then you could make periodic backups with CCC to it. In any case that your external drive has trouble, you can easily boot from the internal drive and use that. I always have a cloned installation of osx on an external disk - it's just a simple and cheap backup.

Booting osx from an ssd through a usb2 enclosure is annoying if you're used to the responsiveness of full speed usb but its certainly doable.
 
I did exactly this when I planned to trash and rebuild my iMac. I actually did the initial rebuild on an external drive and then when I'd completed it all, I used SuperDuper! to clone it back to the internal drive SSD. It worked perfectly and I have the same 2011 model iMac as you (with the internal SSD and 2Tb mechanical drive).

You don't need a third party bootloader, just hold down the option key during boot and you get the option to select a boot device, see here
 
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