PERIPHERALS

Enlightening answers to your questions about external devices

Enlightening answers for external devices

Fastest startup for a mini

QMy Mac mini Late 2014 starts up from an external 256GB SSD, and I manually transfer documents to its 1TB hard disk when I need. Would my mini start up quicker from a Fusion Drive, and would that be better connected via Thunderbolt, rather than USB3?

AYour fastest option should be to boot from an internal SSD. The performance of external drives is largely dependent on the chipset in the enclosure, and less on the theoretical maximum performance of the bus used to connect the drive. This is particularly true for Thunderbolt and USB 3. External Thunderbolt enclosures are expensive and few, if any, significantly out-perform much cheaper USB 3 enclosures.

Fusion Drives are a great way of getting a large virtual disk at a reasonable cost, delivering SSD-class performance for the most-used files, such as macOS and some apps. However they do impose some overhead above that of just using an SSD.

If you can lead a disciplined life using separate SSD and hard drives as you’ve been doing, and have laid out the contents of the SSD optimally, then that’s still likely to give you a slight edge in performance, and in time taken to start up. A Fusion Drive should make fuller use of the SSD, though.

There’s the added complication that building your own Fusion Drive is currently not supported by Apple. Some users who’ve done this experienced problems when upgrading to Sierra. Sticking to a straight SSD should be most compatible with anything that macOS 10.13 brings us later in the year. You should get the very fastest start up times and best performance from an SSD fitted internally in your Mac mini.