Calling George (or other Mac people here)

[taiwan_girl]

@Axtremus

Excellent!!! Thanks for teh advice. I will look into those and keep you update.

[George K]

@Axtremus said in Calling George (or other Mac people here):

OK, @taiwan_girl , you have "Thunderbolt 2" ports on your computer, that's the best among all the ports on your computer to attach an external hard drive to.

This is my recommendation:

• Get something like this: https://www.owcdigital.com/products/drive-dock-thunderbolt-2 ... this lets you connect additional hard drives to your computer.

That's the dock I have. OWC (macsales.com) is a great outfit.

A 2 TB SSD would probably cost about $150 now - look at Newegg.com for what you want.

After that, the process will be to install MacOS onto the new hard drive and use migration assistant to transfer everything from you old (internal) hard drive to your new (external) SSD.

[George K]

@Axtremus why do you recommend that particular SSD?

[Axtremus]

@George-K said in Calling George (or other Mac people here):

@Axtremus why do you recommend that particular SSD?

The Samsung 860 EVO series hits what I consider a "sweet spot" that balances performance, durability, and cost.

If I want higher durability (more "write cycles" per cell), I can shift up to the 860 PRO, the trade off is I pay more money per GB to get that higher durability.

If I want to save money, I can shift down to the 860 QVO; I will get more GB per $, the trade off is the sustained "write" throughput will be materially slower than the 860 EVO.

Why do I stick to Samsung's 860 series? Because I have been using the Samsung 850, then the 860 for many years and they have yet to fail me.

[George K]

@Axtremus thanks for your thoughts.

I'm using a WD Blue 3D NAND 2TB Internal SSD. I believe I paid about $200 for it.

You said your Samsung drive has yet to have an issue. How will I know if my WD drive starts to have problems, other than a complete failure?

[Axtremus]

@George-K No data corruption, no incident of the drives causing the system to "crash" or "hang", and on occasions when I bother to look at the S.M.A.R.T. report for those drives, the readings never give me reason to worry.

[taiwan_girl]

Calling Ax and George again!
@Axtremus ; @George-K

I have finally receive the docking station and hard drive. Thanks for teh recommendations!!

Now, do you have directions to a "tutorial" that could help me transfer the entire current hard drive (including start up information) to my new external hard drive.

If the current hard drive becomes no longer usable, that is okay, as I have plenty of space. If it is available to use as an extra drive for storage (or something like that), that is okay too.

Thanks again!!!

[George K]

@taiwan_girl said in Calling George (or other Mac people here):

Calling Ax and George again!
@Axtremus ; @George-K

I have finally receive the docking station and hard drive. Thanks for teh recommendations!!

Now, do you have directions to a "tutorial" that could help me transfer the entire current hard drive (including start up information) to my new external hard drive.

If the current hard drive becomes no longer usable, that is okay, as I have plenty of space. If it is available to use as an extra drive for storage (or something like that), that is okay too.

Thanks again!!!

Here's what I've done in similar situations.

Boot from the "Recovery Partition" of your hard drive, if you have one. Restart the Mac holding "command-R". It should give you a minimal startup with several options.

If your hard drive doesn't have a "Recovery Partition" you can start up from an internet source: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201314

Then, it'll ask you what you want to do.

Tell it that you want to restore from your time machine backup.

More tips at the link I included.

[Axtremus]

You current internal hard drive still works fine, right?
You just want to put an "exact copy" of the content of your internal hard drive in your new, external SSD, right?

For that, a piece of software you can use is Carbon Copy Cloner.

That lets you create "Bootable Backup" - meaning after you copy the whole internal drive over to your new SSD, it also makes it possible for you to boot up from that new SSD in the future.

See this article: https://bombich.com/kb/ccc5/best-practices-updating-your-macs-os
Step-by-step instruction under the subheading "Make your bootable backup before upgrading"

After Step 6 completes, Step 7 tells you how to set the computer to start-up from your new SSD, Step 8 is to check that you have indeed started up from your new SSD. If your intention is to have faster start-up by using your new SSD as the start-up drive going forward, then there is no need to go through Step 9 and Step 10.

After Step 8, your new SSD will be your start-up drive.

If you want to, you can retrace Steps 1-6 to have Carbon Copy Cloner "copy" from your (new SSD) start-up drive to another drive (that other drive can be your old/internal drive, or if you get another SSD that you plug into the other slot of the docking station, that other SSD can also be your backup drive).

Good luck.

[George K]

@Axtremus good instructions. Much more comprehensive than my suggestions.

I love CCC - it is one of my routine backup strategies.

[taiwan_girl]

@Axtremus @George-K

Thank you very much gentlemen!!!!! I will try it and let you know how it turns out.

And Ax, yes, I am doing this for two reasons,

mainly for faster startup and faster running applications
extra space for appilications ((current HD is 500 and new one is 1TB).

[taiwan_girl]

Thank you so much @George-K and @Axtremus

I received the docking station and external hard dive per your recommendations.

Got them installed and transferred the material to the external hard drive.

Wow - what a difference. My computer was very very very slow, especially when running applications such as MS Office, Auto Cad, Photoshop, etc (even things like iTunes, etc.). Starting up an applications took forever, and even working on them took forever. Changing a file or making a change to a file was an exercise in patience!!!

Now, it is much much faster!! Almost like a new computer.

Thanks again!!!!!

[George K]

Glad it worked out.

Somewhere I read that the Mac needs at least 10% of the hard drive space free to do its housekeeping.

Also the more RAM you have, the better - you'll get better performance by increasing RAM.

[xenon]

[George K]

Rumors are that the next iteration of the iMac will not have traditional spinning-platter hard drives, but everything will be SSD.

That'll be interesting for those of us that have tons and tons of photos, music, etc on their internal hard drives.

[Axtremus]

@George-K said in Calling George (or other Mac people here):

That'll be interesting for those of us that have tons and tons of photos, music, etc on their internal hard drives.

Just buy one with a higher capacity built-in SSD. Already you can configure a 4TB SSD for a MacBook Pro, so a 4TB SSD for an iMac shouldn’t be a too challenging technically.

[xenon]

@George-K I haven’t dealt with a HDD in years now on both my work and home computes (including MacBooks).

I couldn’t imagine using an hdd now.

[Klaus]

There’s a lot of data that doesn’t benefit much from SSDs, such as movies. The same holds for data that changes very frequently. It makes a lot of sense to have a cheap HDD in addition to SSD.

Apple used to sell “hybrid” drives, which also retry to combine the advantages of both. I’m not sure why they’ve given up on them.

[xenon]

@Klaus the price of NAND keeps going down.

At some point the economics on a per byte basis will probably be in the favor of SSDs.

Or rather, for the consumer market - the price differential becomes negligible.

(There’s still a big gap for enterprise applications because of the volumes required).

With Apple’s juicy margins - it’s probably easier to just kick out hdd’s altogether.

[Klaus]

Well, let's say you want 8TB of persistent memory.

An 8TB HDD costs something like 250$.

If you configure a Mac Pro with 8TB of SSD, they want $3000 or so more for it.

It's a significant difference.