Speed Up Your Mac with an External SSD Robin Monks. If you have an i. Mac with Thunderbolt or USB 3 but without an SSD you can boot from a full speed external SSD without opening the case. Its possible for that Mac to boot in under 3. Update October 2, 2. Lots of folks have reported that this works with El Capitan and Ive used it with mac. OS Sierra as well. Just follow the instructions as below, using the new installer version. I have a mid 2. 01. Mac I use at my office to keep my workspace clean and straightforward. Most of my real work takes places online or on remove servers the OS isnt a factor that I take into consideration. Nevertheless, Mac OS X  or mac. OS running on an HDD i. Mac is SLOW. It can easily take 4 minutes to fully boot to a useful state. I wanted to move my system device to an SSD to improve that performance. Realizing that opening up an i. Mac is an absolute nightmare I started looking for external options, and Thunderbolt presented itself as the best possible option for my model. KWW0sJ-89lU/0.jpg' alt='Install Linux On Fusion Drive Vs Hard' title='Install Linux On Fusion Drive Vs Hard' />The latest PC gaming hardware news, plus expert, trustworthy and unbiased buying guides. Thunderbolt can transfer at 5. Gbs and USB 3 at 2. Gbs. Either of these is more than enough to take full advantage of an SSD. Firewire 8. 00 is also an option for older i. If you need to run Windows inside OS X, you have three options VirtualBox, VMware, and Parallels. Each has their own strengths and weaknesses, and different use. Mans best friend has long stood by our side with a little help from the humble dog leash. But if youre in the market for a leash to wrangle your new pet, which. Make a Bootable Mac OS X 10. Lion Installer from a USB Flash Drive. Macs, although I havent extensively researched it. My mid 2. 01. 1 model only had Thunderbolt support, so Thunderbolt it was. La. Cie now makes ready to go Thunderbolt 1. USB 3 1. 40 at time of writing external SSD drives that can be easily connected to your Mac. All you need to do is connect the drive and boot from it remember, the drive will always need to stay connected, since your Mac will be running from this drive. To begin, download the OS X or mac. OS version youre using, to do that head to the App Store commandspace and type app store to find the application. Filezilla Download Multiple Files At Once more. Go to the product page for the OS version youre using and click Download, then Continue to download the full Installer. The full installer is several Gigabytes in size, and will take some time to download it has everything necessary to make a completely fresh installation of Mac OS. If you dont want to end up with a totally clean new Mac OS Xmac. OS install, use this time to make a full Time Machine backup that can be restored into the newly install copy of Mac OS Xmac. OS once its completed. Learn how to set up Time Machine with Apple Support. Open the Disk Utility commandspace and type the name of the application and click on your NEW external SSD and choose the Partition tab, and choose 1 Partition from the drop down menu. Select Mac OS Extended Journaled as the Format and Name the new partition whatever youd like. Click the Options button and choose GUID Partition Table as the partition scheme and click OK. Finally verify your choices one last time and click Apply on the Disk Utility window to commit your changes to the new disk. Go ahead and start the OS Xmac. OS installation wizard, and continue though the first screens until you reach the disk selection step. Here, select Show All Disks and choose the new external partition you created earlier, finally selecting Install and confirm your administrative password to begin installs OS Xmac. OS on your new drive. If youre restoring a Time Machine backup, once the new OS is installed shut down your Mac and hold down CommandR while booting it up again. Youll see the Recovery Options window, and from here you can select Restore from a Time Machine backup and follow the steps to restore your files and preferences from the backup you took earlier to your new install. If you find any Applications missing from your restored system you can usually copy them from the Applications directory of the internal hard drive that will still be available from inside Finder. Your Mac should begin to use the new External disk to boot from automatically from now on. But if it doesnt you can press and hold the Option key while starting your Mac to select which disk you want to boot from. You can also change the default startup disk in the Startup Disk preferences screen by booting into your new installation, clicking the Apple icon in the top left corner and selecting System Preferences then Startup Disk and choosing your external SSD drive in the list. Make a Bootable Mac OS X 1. Lion Installer from a USB Flash Drive. Im going to walk through the process of making a bootable Mac OS X 1. Lion installation drive out of any USB flash drive key. This is similar to the process of making a bootable Lion installer DVD, but I prefer a USB flash drive because its faster, smaller, and I have a Mac. Book Air so an installation DVD isnt too useful for me. This is pretty easy to do, but I have made the walkthrough as simple as possible with plenty of screenshots, so just follow along the instructions. Requirements Got all that Good, lets proceed. Were going to assume you already have Mac OS X Lion downloaded from the App Store, if you dont, do that first. If you have anything stored on the USB flash drive youre going to lose it, so be prepared for that and back it up. First we are going to locate the Lion Install. ESD. dmg file and mount it Navigate to your applications folder. Right click or control click on the Install Mac OS X Lion. Show Package ContentsOpen the Contents directory and then go into Shared. SupportDouble click on Install. ESD. dmg to mount the Lion disk image onto your Mac desktop, it will show up like the image below. Next, we format the USB flash drive, this will become the bootable Lion installer Plug the USB flash drive into your Mac. Launch Disk Utility. Select your USB drive from the left side of Disk Utility, then click on the Erase tab. Choose Mac OS Extended Journaled as the Format, and name the USB key what you want. Click on Erase to format the USB drive. Now that the USB flash drive has been formatted to the appropriate filesystem, we are going to restore the previously mounted Install. ESD. dmg file to the blank USB drive. Right click on the USB drive in Disk Utility and select RestoreNow you need to set the source disk for the restore. This is why we mounted the Install. ESD. dmg file earlier, because we can just drag and drop the Mac OS X Install ESD image into the Source if you didnt mount the image, you can manually locate and select the image file yourself by clicking on ImageDrag the formatted USB key to the Destination and check Erase destinationBe sure you have the right things in the right places, you dont want to format the wrong drive then click on RestoreNow you wait while the Lion DMG is restored to the USB drive, this can take a while and youll see a screen like this When this is finished, your bootable Mac OS X Lion installer drive is complete You can now boot any Lion compatible Mac with the USB drive, just plug the USB key in, hold down Option during initial boot, and select the drive. Heres what youll see upon booting with the drive connected From here you can format, restore from backups, or reinstall Lion. If youre wondering about the other drives pictured, its because I am dual booting Lion and Snow Leopard, and Recovery HD is the small recovery partition that Lion installs on its own. This process should work with a standard external USB hard drive too, but I have not tried that specifically. Advantages to making a bootable Lion USB drive You can perform a clean OS X Lion install with the USB drive. The Lion USB key drive becomes a recovery disk with access to Disk Utility, re installation, access Time Machine backups, and everything the Recovery HD partition does. You will have external media to recover and reinstall Lion in the event of total drive failure or some other catastrophe. Enjoy Mac OS X 1.