I wasn't going to get a new external drive until I tried to boot El Capitan from the same OWC drive that I used to boot Snow Leopard. It's prohibitively slow, taking about five minutes just to load, and then very sluggish in the Finder and partially functional.
Much reading on the internet has informed me that USB 3 is where it's at now. Unfortunately, I just bought a refurb 2011 iMac that doesn't have USB 3. It has USB 2, Firewire 800, and Thunderbolt 1. It does have an optical drive.
An external drive turns out be quite important. I clone the drive with SuperDuper, then do incremental backups. Much troubleshooting required me to boot from an external drive, which worked okay on my old Dual Core imac and 10.6, okay enough to get the job done.
So now I'm puzzled about which ports I should pay attention to, what drive to get, and why my current OWC drive can't cut the mustard. I assume this is a Firewire 800 port on my drive which at one time I must have considered fast. I'm not sure what the smaller port is. Nor do I recall when I bought it. It's an OWC drive with clear plastic. It says WD Scorpio Blue, 250 GB.
I don't need a large drive, but I need something with more speed.
