Everything Apple (the Mac heads thread)

Bro. I'm getting over 400 MB/s read and write. It shits all over the 5400 rpm internal drive.
Can't run TRIM commands over USB though, so I'm relying on Samsung's internal garbage collection, which is perfectly fine.

There is more than one flavour of USB 3 though, so make sure if you do this, get one that is UASP, which queues data more effectively, giving you near SATA 3 speeds. Hopefully I'm not breaking some fundamental IT policy at work... I did at least encrypt it before cloning.

Oh, and I sprang for an 850 Pro, as its probably more reliable than most and has a 10 year warranty and a ridiculous endurance rating.

It's faster than Thunderbolt, at least. The up-side to thunderbolt is that you can run TRIM, that's about it.

HOLY BLOODY CRAP.
Ok, links to the bits you bought please. I need to get on this... might also try Ram Drive but thinking that might be too much hassle.
Or would a USB stick of decent quality do the same? I have researched a fair bit but get such mixed reports.

NowApple have embraced USB-C, I wonder what the lifespan of thunderbolt & lighting will be.

Surely frightenly short.

This enclosure:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B00FCLG65U/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1444214143&sr=8-1&pi=SY200_QL40&keywords=inateck+uasp&dpPl=1&dpID=41EbZXO%2BE3L&ref=plSrch

Pair with any good quality SSD. I've used a bunch of Samsung ones and they've always been solid. But get the Pro versions.

Ram disk is too volatile. Don't even.

USB sticks, even though they might be USB3 are terrible for start up drives. They don't have the endurance, speed and internal management (controllers, cache, firmware et al) that a propper SSD has. SSDs are almost computers in their own right, dongles are just dumb storage with a common connector.

Give me a week to use it and report any issues but a lot of people (especially iMac users) do this.

Very interesting, why do folks do it? I obvs want to do it for MOAR fps on steam games (put them on the external).
Really enjoying having everything on one disk internally atm work wise, so much easier for backups etc too.

People do it because opening an iMac is an utter nightmare and simply cloning your boot drive is easy. It won't give you any more fps tho.

can the forum give me a fair valuation on this ? considering selling and getting a more portable MB Air, and connecting to a display/mouse/keyboard when at home

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I thought I liked the look of the new Microsoft Surface Book, then I saw this

I actually quite like it...

Also, 12 hours battery life with a discrete GPU :o

Yeah spec wise it seems fantastic, and the idea of making the screen a tablet is great.

That hinge look s like it's just waiting to be broken though

Mine would be full of fluff and bogies within an hour.

Nah, it's a moving part. Fluff and bogies are reserved for fans and keyboards.

Alright riddle me this.

Need a small cheap Macintosh to run photo editing software as well as the usual web browsing and music storage.

Will the cheapest Mac Mini be up for the task or will it be insufferable?

It will be hell.
Get a better one second hand and max the ram yourself. I found the stock 4gb near unusable for real work.

Figure as much.

second hand one it is, want to keep it under £400 if possible.

2nd hand hackintosh?

Yeah, for photo editing on OS X, 8gb ram goes a long way. It's also heavily I/O constrained so an SSD will change your life more than ram ever will.

Grab a S/H one and chuck in an SSD and ram... my old one was a beast for everything apart from games.

Best solution I reckon, as long I make sure the model does have removable RAM unlike the current model.

From the sound of it, CPU doesn't matter, even if its Core 2 Duo?

Oh I wouldn't go as old as c2d. You can defi get an i5 for mid 3's. It's only the latest gen that are crap. I can look out my data doubler cable purchase if you do get one, that's what ya need to chuck in an additional ssd.

I think there was someone selling a 2011/2012 MBP a few pages back? Those would most likely fit the bill.

Helping a friend out, whose mid-2012 MacBook Air only booted to a blank, white screen, with occasional "startvolume full" complaint.
Booted in save mode, freed up space on and checked volume (120GB SSD), repaired permissions.. partly successful apparently - there's always a couple of entries that don't get fixed.

But now the thing boots up without complaints again - but still does feel laggy: like, fading-in the background image on startup does not happen smoothly.

Not being that familiar with the last OSXs -
is there something I can do to speed-up / clean / repair / check, or does one simply re-new the OS from recovery partion in cases like this?
Also is it advisable to upgrade to Capitan with a machine like that (1.8 GHz i5 / 4GB RAM) or keep Mavericks?

Thanks!

Sound like his hard drive is almost full.