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Booting from external SSD running Logic


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Never tried. Is this even possible without the OS or the app complaining or preventing this?

 

If it is possible, then I'd say you won't feel much of a difference, ...theoretically. But the USB is also used by other USB-devices and often shares the bus on the motherboard with other things, so there might be lags, or general performance issues. The bus for the SSD is separate on the motherboard, and is not shared with anything else.

 

>>> INTERNAL SSD, nothing else mate. Nothing else is faster anyway.

That goes for all applications and especially the OS.

 

Why do you want to do this anyway?

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I've had no problems booting from usb 3.0 clones on 5400rpm 'crappy' drives when things have gone awry. I am not however using many if any samples from that drive. No performance hit using it as a stand alone recorder if you catch my drift.

 

Have to say I really love this feature of OSX and booting from external drives. Great for testing before committing.

 

j.

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Internal has historically been the way to go without question. I was wondering if things have changed with faster interfaces currently available for external drives. My Mac's internal interface is SATA 3.0 which is rated 6Gb/s, while USB 3.0 is 5Gbps, and USB 3.1 Gen2 is 10Gbps, so they seem comparable. But as stardustmedia says, there may be other issues preventing a USB connected drive from reaching maximum theoretical speed.

 

My reason for thinking along these lines is that running from an external SSD would allow for more options when upgrading my system. If I was buying a used or new Mac, I could focus mainly on the CPU and RAM and not worry about the age or capacity of the internal drive.

 

It seems from the feedback here that running external from USB 3 isn't a great option. I wonder if a Thunderbolt connected drive would work for the setup I'm imagining. Thanks for everyone's input.

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It seems from the feedback here that running external from USB 3 isn't a great option.

I really can't imagine why it would be any kind of issue. If anything it may slightly affect booting time, that's all.

 

Think of how your computer works: when you boot up, the OS code is transferred from HD to RAM. Once the computer is running, everything is done in RAM, so the HD is no longer relevant. Well, except for paging... so depending on your RAM use, the amount of RAM installed, and the number of apps you run simultaneously, in theory at least you could see a slight difference in 'hang time' for example when switching to an app that was already launched, but that you haven't used in a while.

 

Same when launching Logic: you transfer Logic's code from HD to RAM and then when using Logic, its code runs from RAM. So no difference there.

 

Then there's where you save your Logic project files as some of the audio files may be streamed in real-time from HD but that's another question since you could save your project files wherever you want independently of which HD you use to boot from.

 

So basically my guess is, if you usually just boot up your Mac, launch Logic and get to work, you won't see any differences at all.

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  • 2 weeks later...

That makes sense, David. Thanks for the insight. I may eventually explore this kind of setup with either USB 3 or Thunderbolt.

 

My 2011 Mac mini died recently, so now I'm working from a 2015 MacBook Pro. The internal SSD is so much more responsive compared with 5400 RPM in the mini. Next I plan to switch both my external drives to SSDs.

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