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I have 2 computers, a faster iMac at work (i5) and an old macbook (C2DUO 2.0Ghz) at home.
The macbook at home has a SSD drive in it, I upgraded it and it's performance is really great.
Now I was wondering, instead of having to my macbook to work everyday, would be worth it to take the SSD out and boot into it from an external case?? This way I only need to take the drive and just plug it in.
I only have an uSB2 case.
Jeff Kranenburg
Posted 2013-01-09T18:01:20.280
Reputation: 147
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Yes, you can do it. Depending on the quirks of OS/X you may need to different OS installations on the SSD. That would be slightly more space using, but not a real problem.
However USB2 is slow. Sequential transfer rates via the USB2 bus are about 35MB/second, way slows than a HDD or a SSD. You would gain some performance gain on random IOs, but I expect the nett result to be a lot slower.
Now if you can replace the external USB casing with something faster (e.g. eSATA or thunderbolt) then: Yes, it will work and be a lot faster.
Hennes
Posted 2013-01-09T18:01:20.280
Reputation: 60 739
You certainly would want to use USB3 instead of USB2, which the newer i5 laptops have, but even that 1st gen USB3 is too slow. What you really need is 2nd gen USB3.0, which is the only thing fast enough to keep up with an SSD, and there are not ANY laptops that have 2nd gen USB3 yet. – djangofan – 2013-01-09T21:26:44.777
Or the mentioned eSATA (up to ~270MB/sec) or Thunderbolt (mostly found on macs, which are the computers the OP mentions). – Hennes – 2013-01-09T21:39:09.470
In my experience, eSATA usually cannot go any faster than 1st generation USB3 (around 20-30 MB/s). The reason being that the eSATA is probably not connected through the system bus in the same way that internal SATA is connected. eSATA has the benefit of the command queueing like USB3, but not optimized, IMHO. I could be wrong. – djangofan – 2013-01-10T00:30:48.977
I get about 80 MB/sec on my Dell E6500 when reading via eSATA, and about the same on my desktop (a gigabyte EX58UD5). (Source disk in both cases is a Throttle pen drive.) – Hennes – 2013-01-10T00:36:53.300
I would think you would have problems booting to a SSD with an operating system on it configured for a different hardware setup. Have you actually tried do it? – martineau – 2013-01-09T18:41:15.250
1That would be a waste, regardless of it working or not. USB 2.0 speeds don't max out traditional hard drives. That said, the only benefit is having everything in one place. But you could just as easily get a large flash drive and work from that. – nerdwaller – 2013-01-09T19:26:30.620