03-20-2025, 12:43 AM
Bern,
While a 2.5" SATA drive in a USB 3 enclosure can do the job - an iMac I just replaced used a 2.5" SATA SSD as its boot drive - dollar for dollar, it isn't cost effective. An NVME PCIE stick and enclosure are similar in cost to a 2.5" SATA drive in a SATA box these days.
If you go the USB 3 route, for similar costs or a few dollars more, you can get an NVME drive and USB 3.x enclosure and it'd be near twice as fast as the 2.5" SATA solution. Since your dad has an M series machine, I'd go for the faster solution. It makes a difference in booting and makes tangible difference when transferring data from one drive to another and absolutely huge a difference when doing mass backups.
I also prefer a "one and done" configuration. I keep the OS, apps and data all on the boot drive. I keep the entire drive backed up. As necessary, I move data from the main drive to an archive drive and keep a backup of the archive drive. That is in addition to cloud storage solutions like Dropbox and iCloud.
Robert
While a 2.5" SATA drive in a USB 3 enclosure can do the job - an iMac I just replaced used a 2.5" SATA SSD as its boot drive - dollar for dollar, it isn't cost effective. An NVME PCIE stick and enclosure are similar in cost to a 2.5" SATA drive in a SATA box these days.
If you go the USB 3 route, for similar costs or a few dollars more, you can get an NVME drive and USB 3.x enclosure and it'd be near twice as fast as the 2.5" SATA solution. Since your dad has an M series machine, I'd go for the faster solution. It makes a difference in booting and makes tangible difference when transferring data from one drive to another and absolutely huge a difference when doing mass backups.
I also prefer a "one and done" configuration. I keep the OS, apps and data all on the boot drive. I keep the entire drive backed up. As necessary, I move data from the main drive to an archive drive and keep a backup of the archive drive. That is in addition to cloud storage solutions like Dropbox and iCloud.
Robert