In this article, you will learn how to speed up your older iMac by booting to an external solid state drive. For this example, you will discover how you can boot to Mac OS Mojave using a Samsung T5 SSD.

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Before we get into how to do it, let’s cover a few reasons why you might want to consider booting to an external SSD with Mac OS Mojave installed. This may surprise you, but even in 2019, some iMacs come with a 5,400 RPM spinning hard drive installed.

Hard drives that run at 5,400 RPM or 7,200 RPM are noticeably slower than modern solid state drives. A solid state drive is also slightly faster than Apple’s Fusion drives, which are a combination of flash storage and a traditional spinning hard drive.

Best Mac Compatible External Hard Drive

If you don’t upgrade to an SSD when you order your iMac, the only way to upgrade to a solid state drive afterward is to remove the iMac screen. Removing the iMac display screen is the only way to gain access to the inner components of the computer. A more cost effective and less intrusive method is to use an external solid state drive instead, like the Samsung T5.

Booting from a solid state drive like the Samsung T5 should give you a boost in performance, especially if you are running an older iMac with a 5,400 RPM hard drive. On top of booting from an external solid state drive, it is also a good idea to store your media files on another solid state drive separate from your operating system.

Having two solid state drives will speed up your photo and video editing workflow and video rendering times, and as of 2019, the prices on solid state drives have come down considerably. For a step-by-step tutorial on how to set up an external boot drive with Mac OS Mojave, check out the video tutorial in this article.

If you are running a similar setup using solid state drives, let me know in the comment section below.

So, I just bought the new Mac Mini a couple days ago. I'd like to store blu-rays on it so I can stream them to my Apple TV. What is the best external blu-ray drive I can use with my Mac Mini? I've gone to several stores and no one has a clue. I get 'they all pretty much work the same' from people. There has to be a reason why some of these are $89 and go up over $200. I tried searching anything and everything on the web, but can only find articles from 2011. Any help would be appreciated! I'm considering ASUS or LaCie, but have been told LG does a pretty good job too (only, I'd like it to be USB 3 or Firewire instead of USB 2). So, I'm incredibly confused. Thanks!

Best Portable External Hard Drive For Mac

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