Drive time

Having recently purchased a Retina 5K iMac with a 7200rpm drive, I quickly realised the mistake I made. I’ve been trialling various Thunderbolt bus-powered drives as a replacement boot drive (LaCie Rugged and OWC On-The-Go Pro), but note that Sonnet have just produced what looks to be a potential market leader. The company claims transfer speeds over 1300MB/sec.

Can I ask if you have any plans to review this product in an upcoming edition? They are extremely expensive, and I would not like to invest that kind of money, should their claims not hold up. Lee Colman Alan Stonebridge says… We aren’t planning on reviewing Sonnet’s Thunderbolt 2 products because they’re really aimed at creative professionals who need their extreme throughput to support things like 4K video. That’s not to say you can’t use them for other things, but it’s a huge extravagance.

In the past we’ve fitted older MacBooks with SATA-III SSDs and added a USB 3.0 SSD in a sub-£20 StarTech.com enclosure to an iMac with good results. Both of those interfaces are unable to reach the Sonnet drive’s transfer rates, but those routes will still transform you iMac experience.

After adding an SSD, consider running sudo trimforce enable in Terminal. This switches on support for the TRIM command with third-party SSDs. However, precisely because this is a non-standard way of operating – and because the command warns of the potential for data loss, you should absolutely be backing up.