Quote:
Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm
You could make it easy for folks, I am not going to pick through CPU offerings to guess exactly what you have. 24”? 27”? 5K? Model code? EMC ?
And what current drive(s). You can also upgrade the internal drive(s) which while more work can still be a great option. OWC is probably the place to start for options there. Including for high speed PCIe/NVMe SSD upgrades for Apple’s proprietary slots. If you want to keep the iMac for a while that might be worth it.
For your USB 3.2 Gen 2 (in stupid USB-IF naming) aka 10 Gbit USB I suspect you should be using the USB Type-C ports on your iMac not the Type-A ports that may be only USB 3.0 aka 5 Gbps. The T7 can make use of that extra speed as it is not SATA, but it is also not Thunderbolt, so does not deliver high-end Thunderbolt 3 SSD performance.
Securing the T7 and USB Type-C connections so the do not get accidentally disconnected is worth worrying about. There are different mounts and clips out there that might be usable.
Since you are already on Monterey you can only clone boot drives using Apple’s APFS Replicator. Depends on what you are working on/tolerance for risk, but if doing a clean macOS install on the external drive you might want to do a clean Ventura install. I am not sure how many more major macOS releases there will be for Intel Macs, but if doing a new clean macOS install I would be tempted to move forward to Ventura (which I have on my one MacBook Pro, currently booting off an external Thunderbolt SSD and will get cloned back internally in future.).
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Sorry Darryl. It's a 5K, 27 inch. Model Identifier Mac 19.1. I used Carbon Copy Cloner to make a bootable backup and set it as my startup disk. When there's more compatibility with Ventura, I'll make that jump.