Years later, I’m still using the 2017 iMac with the T5 as the boot drive. I find its performance to be completely acceptable for my use case. Of course, it’s no match for my M2 MBA, but again, it’s fine for my needs. I agree with everyone who stated that Apple should never have sold this machine configured with the HDD or the Fusion Drive. My brother-in-law purchased it with the HDD–his first Mac–and it’s negatively affected his opinion of Apple hardware despite my suggestion for how to make it useable.
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I agree with everyone who stated that Apple should never have sold this machine configured with the HDD or the Fusion Drive. My brother-in-law purchased it with the HDD–his first Mac–and it’s negatively affected his opinion of Apple hardware despite my suggestion for how to make it useable.
Yes! Some of their decisions seem to be driven by inexplicably short-sighted, counter-productive penny-pinching. I ended up replacing the HDs in my pre-Retina MacBook Pros shortly after purchase, with the 7200 rpm drives that should have been the default. (Of course later I swapped in SSDs.) The iMac situation is made much worse by how difficult it is to open and repair them.
I don’t like much of anything about the iMac concept. It would make a lot more sense to me if the entire computer part could be detached from the display, so that the display could at least be reused as such when the computer half goes belly-up. They are expensive throwaways.
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Update: I tried running the full Ventura 13.5.2 to update the external HDD, overlaying what was copied there by asr. No change to the cloned Data volume.
The result was that it booted! Which if nothing else, tells me that the hardware is bootable.
I don’t know yet if it can boot a second time, or if doing a new clone to the Data volume will break it.
And I was unable to turn File Vault on – when I clicked Turn On, nothing happens. Google told me to check for a secure token, which for my user account is “disabled”. Not sure if that troubleshooting information is accurate for Ventura on Apple Silicon. Or how to fix it. Or why macOS doesn’t display an error.
FWIW, the experience of running this Mac on the portable HDD drive was actually marginally less miserable than my Late 2016 MacBook Pro was. It still isn’t something I’d want to do, but I wasn’t screaming in frustration.
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Update: Can’t boot it a second time, it gets to the login prompt, but after that panics with a “registry root held busy” error.
I see a problem in the macOS source code: apparently the code that is loading extensions (or waiting for them to load?) gives extra time on x64 chips only, because it is assuming that if you’re on Apple Silicon, you must be booting from an SSD. That is, it is only allowing for a slower HDD on Intel because Apple Silicon machines only have SSD internal drives.
If I’m reading that right, it means that the idea that you can still boot an Apple Silicon machine from a HDD isn’t really supported, contrary to all the web posts that claim it is. It might work, depending on speed of the drive and number of extensions. But it might not.
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I bought that same enclosure after reading a Howard Oakley article (referenced by Simon in a post about external drive speed). I can’t find Simon’s post but I love this Sabrent Thunderbolt 3 enclosure (SABRENT Thunderbolt 3 Certified M.2 NVMe SSD Tool Free Solid Aluminum Enclosure EC-T3NS). I installed a SAMSUNG 980 PRO SSD 2TB PCIe NVMe and cloned the external Sandisk 1 TB SSD drive we were using to run our 2017 iMac. The iMac has a fusion drive that somehow got unlinked into a small ssd and separate spinning drive. The iMac was running fine on the USB-C Sandisk but others had reported problems with those drives. I am very happy to have the larger Thunderbolt drive.
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I also have a 2017 27" iMac with a failing internal Fusion drive. Rather than go through the pain of replacing the Fusion drive, I bought an external 2T OWC Envoy Pro FX SSD, installed the current MacOS at the time on it, and used Migration Assistant to move my stuff over. It’s now my boot drive, and it updates just fine with new MacOS releases. Just this past week I updated to Ventura 13.6. It’s given my iMac a new lease on life!
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