#1580: iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 Pro, Apple Watch Series 7, redesigned iPad mini, and upgraded iPad, plus iOS 15, iPadOS 15, watchOS 8, and tvOS 15Best External Hard Drives for MacBook in 2021. While transfer speeds aren’t the quickest, due to its USB 3.0 connection, it offers a good balance between speed, capacity and price. Smart displays, iOS 12.5.5 and Catalina security update, iPhone 13 problem with Apple Watch unlockingThis is the latest generation of the Western Digital My Passport external hard drives comes in capacities from 1TB to 4TB, and features cloud storage and 256-AES encryption, along with WD’s own backup software. #1581: New Safari 15 features, Center Stage vs. Connect the drive to a USB port on your AirPort base station, then turn it on. Connect the drive directly to your Mac, then use Disk Utility to erase it.#1578: Apple delays CSAM detection, upgrade Quicken 2007 to Quicken Deluxe, App Store settlement and regulatory changes Apple lawsuit decided, Internet privacy limitations, combine Mac speakers #1579: Apple “California Streaming” event, OS security updates, Epic Games v.At the time, spending $300 for a 512 GB SSD didn’t make sense because I needed more storage, and $700 for the 1 TB SSD upgrade was too dear for my budget. While I had configured it with 32 GB of memory, I opted for a 1 TB Fusion Drive, Apple’s combination of a fast, low-capacity SSD with a slow 5400 rpm, high-capacity hard drive. But it took me until two weeks ago to truly unleash its power.When I bought the iMac, I unfortunately cheaped out in one important regard. When I purchased a quad-core 21.5-inch iMac with Retina display in 2017 and added a secondary 4K display, I felt that I had spent the right amount of money relative to my needs. With a few delightful exceptions that involve printing history and letterpress, I spend most of my day looking at a screen, tapping away on a keyboard, and manipulating a mouse.
![]() Best External Hard Drive 1Tb 2015 Plus IOS 15I chose the cheapest path again, which was upgrading to 64 GB of memory and selling my previous 32 GB to a friend.The extra RAM helped, but not enough. A shift to Catalina would require additional resources to run a virtual machine effectively so I could keep Mojave available for those two apps (see “ Moving to Catalina: Keep Your 32-Bit Mac Apps Running with Parallels,” 18 September 2019). It was only once I upgraded to 10.14 Mojave that I found myself waiting seemingly forever for apps to launch and disk-intensive tasks to finish.As I grew increasingly frustrated, 10.15 Catalina appeared in late 2019, and I had two critical 32-bit apps I wanted to keep using indefinitely. The Fusion Drive initially suited me well with macOS 10.12 Sierra and seemed to sail through 10.13 High Sierra without causing me grief. (See “ iMac 1 TB Fusion Drives Have Smaller SSDs,” 7 August 2017.)I didn’t notice the performance tradeoff most of the time. Despite having just 16 GB of memory, the M1 MacBook Air runs measurably far faster than my iMac. Do you remember first seeing a Retina display? I remember glancing at one and thinking, “Oh, no, I must not get used to this, or my current screen will seem like it’s composed of giant blocky pixels.” Eventually, my budget let me move to Retina.The M1 chip had the same effect. I soldiered on for another 18 months, through the Catalina release and then macOS 11 Big Sur, upgrading my Mac laptop to each in turn for researching and writing.Purchasing an M1-based MacBook Air finally pushed me over the edge. SSDs these days rely on NVM Express, a standard built on top of PCI Express, which can offer up to 10 times the rate, challenging the top rates offered by Thunderbolt 3. SATA III SSDs top out just below 600 MBps (around 5 Gbps, USB 3’s base-level speed), which is a few times faster than even a 7200 rpm hard drive.Since then, however, technology and pricing have improved by leaps. Such SSDs package flash memory in a 2.5-inch drive case but are limited by the SATA III throughput rates. With a couple of previous Mac minis, I had switched to an affordable 512 GB external startup drive that used an external SSD in a SATA III format and connected via USB 3. I began using screen sharing to avoid waiting several minutes for Adobe InDesign or Photoshop to launch they launched in about 10 seconds on my MacBook Air.The solution was obvious—I needed faster storage on the iMac. I set System Preferences > Startup Disk to boot from the cloned SSD. With Carbon Copy Cloner, I made a complete copy of my Mojave startup volume to the SSD. Using a Thunderbolt 3 port, I connected the SSD and formatted it as APFS, without encryption. The step up is an 8 TB NVMe SSD blade is $1349 from OWC that fits into a $79 Envoy Express Thunderbolt 3 enclosure.) (As a gauge of SSD price drops, you can buy a SATA III-packaged 8 TB SSD for under $800, or nearly what I would have paid for a 1 TB SSD upgrade option in 2017. Fusion Drive performance, top. On the external Thunderbolt 3 SSD, I consistently measured nearly 1600 MBps on writing and almost 2200 MBps on reading. It worked as I had hoped—everything worked essentially as fast as comparable actions on the host Big Sur operating system managing my Mac.In my interactions with the iMac, it now feels like I had a major hardware update, particularly with Big Sur as the startup system, which makes it seem like a different machine altogether.In testing with Blackmagic Disk Speed Test, my Fusion Drive initially showed hundreds of MBps for read and write, but after a few tests clearly shifted operations from the SSD to the hard drive, rates dropped to just above 60 MBps for writes and a bit above 70 MBps for reads. I launched the latest version of Parallels Desktop and tested its performance virtualizing Mojave. When installation was complete, I restarted into Big Sur using the external SSD. I wanted to leave my internal Fusion Drive on Mojave as a backup position. It used to take minutes to launch and load a project, editing performance was often poor, and exporting mixed-down files was sluggish at best. I had standardized on Adobe Audition years ago, and Audition hits the drive hard. In particular, I found that my love of audio editing for podcasts returned. Or, in a year or two, I could upgrade it to 2 TB or maybe even 8 TB—SSD prices continue to fall. If anything goes south with this volume, I can simply replace it, instead of cutting open the iMac. The performance of a Thunderbolt 3 SSD is effectively as good as if I’d paid Apple for an internal SSD. The decision to skimp on a Fusion Drive instead of an SSD didn’t seem regrettable initially, though it was eventually painful.But the wait was worthwhile. I was desperate to get back to work without breaking the bank. It was delightful.None of us are made of money, and when I purchased this iMac in 2017, I had just suffered a second Mac mini failure in as many years. I assume I benefit “heat” wise by not being able to use the 970 EVO at full speed. Note the controller in this enclosure does not give the Thunderbolt 3 speeds of enclosures in the $150 and more price range. I ran every speed test and it performs as good as expected in the Envoy Express enclosure. I also added a 2TB Seagate Barracuda 3.5 HD in an enclosure for a surprising low cost for a pleasingly fast and quiet backup drive.The external 970 EVO has Big Sur on it and has been only lightly used so far. Small price to pay.The speed of the 2019 iMac running on its Fusion drive with Catalina seems similar so far to running Big Sur on the external SSD in said configuration.Yep…straight from OWC…although the OS will install fine to an OWC SSD…the only way to get 5he firmware update is to reinstall the original…and it must be in the laptop and not an external case. The only thing maybe not perfect is since the Envoy Express enclosure is bus powered, it’s short cable limits where I can place it. It has never been hot or deviated even for heavy writing.
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