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Back in 2015 I got the first 27” 5K iMac. It was a beautiful machine and has served me well to this day. Up until now the only thing I’ve upgraded is the RAM, but two years later it started to struggle, especially when it came to rendering video content.

Now there is no way I’m gonna pull of that front pane of glass to upgrade anything internally. My mistake, and one I regret to this day is the fact that I got the iMac with a 1TB mechanical drive, mainly because the SSD prices back then were astronomical.

But the iMac has an ace up its sleeve and that’s the Thunderbolt port. Why pull apart a perfectly good machine when you can plug in an SSD drive into it and have it perform as well as an internal one? And that’s exactly what I did.

Enter stage left the Buffalo MiniStation. A Thunderbolt connected SSD drive which has changed my life. As you Mac buffs well know, you can boot from any media of your choosing. So without delay I installed High Sierra to it and man, my Mac is back.

I only went for the 128GB version. One because I’m not going to be storing any data on it, and two, the price. It’s 140 quid but it then releases my internal 1TB drive just for storage.

Before, when I used to fire up Adobe CC apps it took quite a while to load but now it takes seconds.

The drive itself, even though it doesn’t matter looks lovely. As well as the Thunderbolt connection it also has an option for USB 3.

There is nothing not to like and if you have a Thunderbolt enabled Mac and it’s being a bit of a dog then please consider this as a way to prolong the life of your device.

Author

Paul Wright

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