Jacks, external drives, RAM:
Thunderbolt is new to me. I also have four USB 2 jacks and one Firewall 800. I'm quite happy about having these plentiful, fast (to me) connections. My Matias keyboard has two USB ports but they're not very good. Another strike against Matias.
I'm looking at hard drives for backup. Any opinions? Which port should be used with a backup drive: USB 2, Firewire 800, or Thunderbolt? I would probably get a mechanical backup drive, not an SSD. I'm not sure. It has to be bootable. On my old iMac I used SuperDuper to clone the hard drive to an OWC Firewire 400 drive, then did incremental backups. That drive booted the OS with no problem. I dislike Time Machine and never used it. I dislike the idea of a constant backup in which your hard drive is always connected, always running, reading and writing data. I would rather keep it in another room without so much use. In all these years I've only had one hard drive go bad, an external Fantom. SuperDuper has always done what I've wanted without problems, and I see no reason to change, though using Windows 7 taught me how handy disc images and ISO files can be.
Anyone have an opinion about the speed and quality of OWC drives versus other brands? I've bought a lot from OWC over the years but I sometimes wonder if there are better, faster products.
What about OWC RAM versus Crucial RAM? Crucial is out of stock of the RAM that works for this iMac, but I'm wondering if I even need more RAM. I have 8 GB now. Would another 8 or 16 GBs give me a noticeable improvement?
