Im avoiding Sierra because well, it seems to be a bit of a mess.

Before the external SSD, I was using a standard hard drive over FW800 and only getting between 70-75 MBps throughput over the FW800 connection.

With the external SSD over FW800, I am averaging about 94-95 MBps with sometimes the data transfer has gone to nearly 100 MBps This is close to a 25 increase in data transfer speeds using an externally enclosed SSD in a FW800 enclosure with a FW800 cable.

Best Os For 2009 Mini Mac Feels Pretty

And with no mechanical hard drive, my late 2009 iMac feels pretty quick and snappy running OS X 10.9.5 Mavericks.

This enclosed SSD wasnt that cheap, but wasnt all that expensive, either.

I am using an external 480 GB SSD with approx.

GBs left on the SSD.

With the introduction of SSDs to the Mac lineup, I have become convinced that the MacOS is optimized to run best on a computer with an SSD.

We used to think that an SSD was just good for speeding up application launches and startup times but my experiments with computers ranging from a 2007 iMac to a 2012 Mac mini proved to me at least that the SSD does much more.

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MichelPM probably is using a FireWire enclosure for the same reason I did at first - to avoid opening up his iMac to install the SSD internally.

Granted, when I finally took that sucker apart and installed the SSD internally I saw another speed jump, but even with the drive in the enclosure my computer went from dragging and beach balling in Mavericks to feeling like its old self.

The proc is fine for everything except VMWare Fusion, where it is a little slow but still quite usable.

Replace the hard drive with a plain vanilla 1TB SATA-3 drive.

Cost Done.

It finally got to the point where the beachball was showing up more and more, intermittent freezes and the occassional shutdown.

Plus, already having multiple FireWire 800 external mechanical hard drives, they arent quite as fast as an internal drive.

I just wanted an external drive that would have some modicum of speed improvement over a spinning platter hard drive and I knew there would be a data speed improvement by just,switchingusing an externally enclosed, no moving parts, flash memory-based SSD would be any level of improvement.

Not sure where you are from, but I live in the U.S.

U.S. everything Mac, dealerreseller I purchased my drive from.

Youll need to purchase the power adapter for use with FireWire 800 connection.

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