Which SSD would help my 2017 Mac?

By honest nan, 21 September, 2022

Forum
Apple Hardware and Compatible Accessories

I have a desktop type Mac from 2017 with an Intel doo corps I5 processor. At least I think that's what it said.
After educating my ignorant self a little on solid state discs, I looked on Amazon. Help! There are loads of them.
Can anyone recommend an SSD that will hold my OS and give me some better speed?

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Comments

By Chris on Tuesday, October 4, 2022 - 17:58

macOS can boot from an external drive, which is one of the coolest things about this awesome OS! If you don't want to give yourself an aneurysm trying to take apart an iMac, get the Samsung T5 or T7 or a similar portable USB C SSD. If you want, you could get a relatively small capacity drive to install macOS on, and then use your internal HDD for data storage. Essentially, you need to connect the SSD to a USB C port on your Mac and then install macOS to that drive. It might not be as fast as an internal SSD, but it should be faster than the internal HDD. Just be very careful not to unplug the SSD while macOS is running, because that would probably be very very bad for the system!

By Scruffy Ted 🧸 on Tuesday, October 4, 2022 - 17:58

Another recommendation here for either the Samsung T5 or T7. I also have a Sandisk SSD which has worked well and has similar performance.

My advice would be to completely avoid anything with a read speed lower than 540 MB/s. If your budget allows, I would recommend at least 1050 MB/s. This should give good performance for most typical use cases and also have some overhead for future-proofing. Anything slower than 540 MB/s is likely to be a false economy that you may live to regret. Anything faster than 1050 MB/s is likely to be an unnecessary luxury that won't deliver any real-world benefits unless you have a very specific and demanding use case.