IMac Hard Drive Replacement

[OldMacUser]

Hello all!

I have a late 2012 iMac 27-inch with pretty much all the stock hardware. Recently my internal 1TB HDD took a turn for the worse and is pretty much gone. Fortunately, I have good time machine backups.

The computer itself is fine otherwise so I got an external Samsung 500GB T7 SSD and was able to successfully install and boot up Catalina. It's running pretty well in the USB 3.0 port and getting speeds up to 625 MB/s. My understanding is that if I connect through the Thunderbolt 1 port with an adapter I can get speeds of 700-800 MB/s which would be fantastic.

My question: is it worth it at all to get an internal SSD? I found a local repair shop that would do the job for $125 but I'm not sure if there would be an improvement in speed and I've read a few conflicting things online about the speed I'd get. Outside of speed, are there any downsides I'm not considering in running the machine off of an external drive?

Any wisdom and correction of my understanding is welcome!

SJ

 

[Nukeban]

I have a 2011 - 27inch iMac and have booted off an external drive for years at a time. I've booted off a couple of different non-ssd drives via Firewire. I don't know anything about Catalina, as I've been using Sierra and earlier.

I recently purchased at 3TB non-ssd drive for $140 on Amazon. Seems to work fine for both booting and backups.

You have a USB 3.0 port? They must have come in the year after my model?

I don't see a reason to buy the internal drive. Perhaps others can suggest a reason?

Lufbrarunner shares his backup strategy in the following thread, was educational for me.​

Backup Strategies

Hi all, I'm upgrading my backup strategy and would appreciate any advice. Currently I have a 1TB boot drive which I backup to an external drive via USB using SuperDuper. This works ok, but because it takes many hours I don't do it very often, thus my backups tend to be pretty old. Smart...

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