- EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE FOR IMAC 2011 UPGRADE
- EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE FOR IMAC 2011 SOFTWARE
- EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE FOR IMAC 2011 WINDOWS
You might achieve some small gains going from 8GB to 16GB, and this upgrade should be cheap at Crucial - my 16GB RAM purchase was under $200 USD.Īfter hours and hours of searching the 'net for the best solution, I stumbled on a number of blogs & websites that wrote about their experience with using an external Thunderbolt drive on iMacs the same vintage as my own. Spend some time looking at Activity Monitor and see how much RAM your system is using and what it is swapping out to disk. Between the two programs and base system stuff, Activity Monitor reports ~11GB-~12GB of RAM in use under my normal operating conditions. I am not a power user, but love to listen to music (iTunes) while I work in LR. I recently went up to 20GB RAM in my 2011 iMac. My local Apple dealer suggested installing more RAM (I have 8GB and I am by no means a 'power user') and installing an internal SSD or upgrading the computer. I've had issues for ages with my iMac being slow always accompanied by excessive hard disk read/write noises. I offer this experience in the spirit of sharing my successful upgrade with others that may have a similar setup to my own and could potentially benefit from a similar upgrade. I care more for real world performance but others online have done proper benchmarking and report similar results. I didn't run benchmarking before and after.
My setup took a performance hit when I moved my Home folder from the new Thunderbolt SSD boot disk to the internal HD but I didn't have any choice given the size restrictions. If I had it to do over, had I known the results would be so spectacular, I would have purchased a larger SSD: either a larger Lacie external drive or bought the Seagate Thunderbolt cradle and added a 480GB drive to that. Yes, it operates at orders of magnitude faster than a turn table but RAM (SSD's) operates at orders of magnitude faster than the spinning platters of the hard disk. It was difficult for me to think two things: that the internal HD was such a terrible bottle neck in the system and that the Thunderbolt interface could provide such amazing throughput. In hindsight, I suppose the hard disk is the computer equivalent of a vinyl turntable. The difference is astonishing and has given my computer new life. is many, many times faster than my old setup.
EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE FOR IMAC 2011 WINDOWS
Applications launch instantly, my boot time is 10-15 seconds, opening files, Finder windows etc. The results: the difference in performance is difficult for me to believe.
Lastly, I enable TRIM support for the external drive by using some Terminal commands. I then cloned the larger partition to an external WD 1TB My Book drive. Then, I formatted the internal 1TB drive and partitioned it: the first small partition is a clone of the now bootable eternal SSD in case of emergencies and the second, larger partition (120GB & 880GB respectively) now contains my Home folder with my music,movies,photos settings etc.
EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE FOR IMAC 2011 SOFTWARE
I began by backing up my internal 1TB hard disk, plugged in the external SSD, formatted it, installed OS X Mavericks on it and used Migration Assistant to transfer all of my software to it. It took a number of hours to set everything up. I found that Lacie offers a 120GB SSD Thunderbolt drive for $199 CDN and thought I had nothing to lose since this alternative, if it worked, would be FAR cheaper than the alternatives offered to me by my local Apple dealer. After hours and hours of searching the 'net for the best solution, I stumbled on a number of blogs & websites that wrote about their experience with using an external Thunderbolt drive on iMacs the same vintage as my own. My local Apple dealer suggested installing more RAM (I have 8GB and I am by no means a 'power user') and installing an internal SSD or upgrading the computer. I just thought I would share my recent experience with updating my mid-2011 27" model iMac with an external Thunderbolt SSD drive to avoid the cost and hassle of installing an SSD drive internally.
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