Originally published at: Portable solid state drives are so cute! | Boing Boing
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Hopefully these will come down in price
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$160 for 1Tb and no moving parts? not too shabby; sez an old fart who can easily recall a 250Mb metal brick for $600…
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When I “upgraded” my late 2012 iMac to Mojave, everything slowed down like I had upgraded to “Molasses”. Turns out that OS is meant for an SSD.
So I bought one of those Samsung 1TB SSDs and installed Mojave on it and now boot from that via USB3.
Holy Crap what a difference! Now I have a useable computer again and if the drive ever craps out I don’t have to open the computer to swap it out.
A year ago it was $180, now it is $120
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I’ve been using small solid state drives for media playing devices for years. So useful having a portable hard drive that I can plug into my computer after downloading large media files and then into a Roku or WDTV box. Or I just keep attached to the media player and transmit files by wifi.
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I bought a couple of 1TB Samsung T5’s last year, early this year. One was for the PS4 (the 1TB PS4 filled up pretty easily!) and another for my kid’s gaming PC. What’s the diff between T5 and T7? You’re right, @frauenfelder - they are small, and cute! It’s amazing how small, and fast, they are!
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I was a QA engineer on a Memorex disk drive manufacturing line in Santa Clara when 100MB weighed 70 pounds. I miss those good old days of programming Zeiss coordinate measuring machines to check freshly-cast and machined aluminum clamshells that housed the 12-inch platters.
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I had to buy this HD last week, https://amzn.to/3qYdKvx . It’s twice the size of @frauenfelder’s HD at 2.5x the price. It’s also fast as fuck Thunderbolt-3 connected directly onto the PCIe bus and is faster than the internal hard drive. It slices and dices giant log files in quick order. For some purposes, this is much better than the evils of Splunk or whatever AWS uses. I highly recommend this fun toy.
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Yes, you want thunderbolt 3 here for maximum speed. The USB enclosures are limited to 10 Gbps = 1.25GB/sec, whereas a good Thunderbolt 3 enclosure (emphasis on good) can do up to 40 Gbps, which is unfortunately a bit of a fantasy in real life, but 2.5 GB/sec is definitely possible if you verify reviews that benchmark it as so!
The Plugable one you mentioned @veggiespam should fit the bill:
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It definitely fits the bill! Highly recommend this device.
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Yeah well, can they be used to mine bitcoin? Because if they can’t now, eventually they will. Then they will become as expensive as video cards.
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Increase the form factor a bit to 2.5" SSD’s and it’s just over $100:
https://www.amazon.com/SAMSUNG-870-QVO-SATA-MZ-77Q1T0B/dp/B089C73T72
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Be VERY careful with those QVO drives. They have bizarre perf characteristics because they are heavily optimized for space and not speed. For example they have {x}GB cache on board and once you blow out that cache… things get very, very weird.
If you only need it for storage and not active use, probably fine. I would strongly advise against using it as, say, your OS boot drive.
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Interesting, I too have a late 2012 and it is indeed dog slow with Mojave.
I didn’t remember the iMac having USB3 back then though. Did you do anything special to hook yours up? Or is it indeed “just jam it into the USB and call it a day”, and that was sufficient to make the iMac “usable” again?
Nothing special. See attached pic for screenshot of device specs and USB tree from System report.
I could not walk you through it, but I did have to download a standalone install of Mojave onto…another USB stick I think and then once that was in place I had to format the SSD as AFS before installing Mojave on it.
Once I figured it out, it was pretty simple but there are a few things you have to do so I would suggest searching on installing Mojave on an external drive for better info than I could possibly supply you with.
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