Once upon a time , Apple made it sluttish to break up opened a Mac , remove a hard drive , and replace it with a new one when the honest-to-god drive was no longer put to work , too slow , or of deficient capacity . Those days are long gone for most Macs , leaving readers to marvel what the best path forward is .
You have efficaciously three option :
The last choice is the most straight and works with any Mac . While I ’m stretch back years when I bring up FireWire 800 , if that ’s the fast connection on your Mac , it ’s a salutary choice than USB 2.0 ( 800Mbps versus 480Mbps ) . ( However , note that if your Mac has FireWire 800 and not USB 3 and it is n’t an iMac , it likely has an easy driveway substitute choice . )
External SSDs up to 1 TB and extraneous hard disc drives ( HDDs ) of many tebibyte have dropped to highly low-priced prices . oppose the drive to the interface you have : there ’s no sense in buying a gamey - performance SSD that can deliver 2 GBps ( 18Gbps ) and plugging it into USB 3.0 , which maxes out at 625MBps ( 5Gbps ) . However , if you have a computer novel enough to have a Thunderbolt 2 ( 20Gbps ) or 3 or 4 ( 40Gbps ) port , you could prefer for a superfast SSD if that fits your budget and needs .
I upgraded my 2017 Intel iMac to a 1 TB Thunderbolt 3 SSD in 2020 , dramatically improving its carrying out . The iMac died short ( at nearly five years old ) in 2021 , and I opted to switch to an M1 Mac miniskirt . Rather than pay the premium for Apple ’s 1 TB internal driving force on that model , I buy one with 16 GB of RAM and a 256 GB SSD , then migrated my iMac ’s system of rules to the external drive via a Thunderbolt 4 connexion .
afterwards , I realized my Photos library was too slow on an international HDD . ( I have two external 8 TB HDDs for Time Machine backups and media entrepot . ) To improve performance , I migrated my Photos library to an inexpensive 1 TB USB 3 SSD , as described in “ How to move your Mac ’s Photos library to an SSD for better performance . ”
You have pile of different options in which you could mix HDDs , tedious SSDs , and firm SSDs to find the right mix .
With a laptop computer , you may discover an outside thrust irritating to manage while travel , but spending $ 100 to $ 300 for an external SSD might ward off a cost after trade - in of hundreds to well over $ 1,000 .
This Mac 911 article is in reception to a question put in by Macworld reader Julie .
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