Does An External Solid State Drive (SSD) Increase Performance In The Same Manner That An Internal One Would ?

I've read quite a bit on Ask Different and elsewhere about how fitting a Solid State Drive (SSD) is one of the best ways (if not the best way) to increase the performance of your Apple Mac computer.

AFAIK this is a piece of hardware that is fitted internally inside the computer in place of the regular hard drive (and therefore takes a bit of technical know-how).

How then does an External SSD as exemplified here fit into the equation of increasing the performance of your Apple Mac ? (or am I getting the wrong end of the stick.)

It's definitely worth going internal. Someone asked the question some time ago here and the conclusion was, that even with USB3 (which only the newest Macs have), the internal version is more than 50% faster.

USB3 external will probably still be faster than a regular 2.5" MacBook drive (assuming that you have a MacBook), maybe even with USB2, but with older hardware (and thus older connectors, e.g. just USB2) the margins will get slimmer.

It may depend on your machine (e.g. if you still have warranty or if it is one that is hard to take apart, like the the very new superslim iMacs), but having retrofitted an SSD into a 2009 iMac I can say the benefit does outweigh efforts IMO.

Also given the SSD you linked there, you can get a current Samsung of the same size less expensive and spend the rest of the money for someone skilled to put it into your machine.

There are two factors at play here:

• How is the storage drive connected to the CPU? (which bus and what else shares that bus)
• How are the bare drives comparable for file access times?

For the jump from HDD to SSD - the bigger factor is the drive and not the bus. There are many benefits to having a drive internal, but benchmark speeds isn't a prime reason. My guess is that if you had the same SSD mounted via USB 3.0, FireWire, Thunderbolt and SATA internally - any of these would get most of the speedup of an internal drive.

I would expect it to be hard to even measure the difference between Thunderbolt and SATA direct connect and I would also expect that if someone didn't know how the drive were connected, you couldn't observe the speed difference between the other connect methods on a modern Mac (but that a benchmark would reveal average access speeds a bit slower on USB or Firewire than if it were connected over a lower latency / higher bandwidth bus).