Upgrade your Mac
Add a fast boot drive to give your Mac a whole new lease of life
ONCE UPON A time, upgrading your Mac’s memory or hard drive was a relatively easy way to extend its usable lifespan. However, newer models have become increasingly more difficult to upgrade, to the point where memory and internal drives are no longer user–replaceable. But don’t worry — if your Mac runs on a painfully slow hard drive or Fusion Drive, you can enjoy the benefits of a much–improved performance by switching to an external solid–state drive (SSD). Yes, thanks to the fast (5Gbps or better) transfer speeds found on USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt ports, your new SSD will noticeably outpace your sluggish internal drive. Below is a list of five recommended SSDs to suit every budget.
Go to > About This Mac > System Report and select “Thunderbolt/USB 4” and “USB” sections to see what speeds you can expect — older USB–A ports typically max out at 5Gbps, which translates to around 500MB/s, close to the top speeds of older SATA–based SSDs. Meanwhile, newer NVMe/vNAND–based SSDs can reach 1,000MB/s through USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports, while Thunderbolt/USB 4 supports the fastest drives.
RUN macOS EXTERNALLY
The guide opposite reveals how to install macOS to your external drive. If you run into problems using Disk Utility, you’ll need to dip into the Terminal and the diskutil command (see ss64.com/osx/diskutil.html for a detailed guide). If your drive isn’t already formatted in the APFS format, then try the following:
diskutil list
Make a note of your drive’s identifier, using its size to help pinpoint it, then issue the following command, substituting “diskname” with your chosen drive label (such as SamsungT7), and “disk4” with your identifier:
diskutil eraseDisk APFS diskname disk4
Once your SSD is correctly formatted, you can go on to install macOS on it, following the first step–by–step guide. You’ll end up booting into a brand new copy of macOS — after updating your new install, open Applications > Utilities to run Migration Assistant to transfer your apps, data and other settings from your old drive to your new one.
Once complete, you can format your old drive and use it as a dedicated storage device. The second step–by-step–guide opposite reveals how to transfer your media files back to free up space on your new drive.