Late 2012 iMac - External SSD Upgrade Q's

[3SQ Machine]

Hijacking thread as its same question basically…

i have a Mac Pro 5,1 and it runs good with upgrades, but its time to retire it i think. Too slow and runs sierra. I cant afford the latest Mac Pro as i dont make any money from the machine. Looking into a 27” iMac from 2017.

Storage wise i have…
500gb x 2 SSDs
500gb HDD
1tb HDD

Is there a case that i can put them in and use thunderbolt 2 to boot from? Or would it be more economical to buy a similar amount of external SSD storage? Do not want to use fusion drive as boot long term. I have an external 2tb HDD as backup on the Mac Pro.

Another question is what is a good second 27” monitor to get that is similar to the iMacs screen? Not worried about color correction stuff, just something that can adjust to the same height with same resolution.

I wanted to flag caution with certain 4K Samsung monitors. I had a heck of a time getting some to play well with macOS and scaling -- it would spike one of the cores despite a discrete GPU. If you're ok with the native resolution on whatever monitor you choose, it will be OK but I would make sure you buy with a generous return policy as I returned a couple of them. I now use a 4K Samsung UE series 24" with my '19 MacBook Air and it's fine, but the same monitor strangely created issues with mac mini and an older iMac. YMMV depending on your use case.

Oh, I will add that for a "case" -- I picked up the Patriot Evlvr 1TB Thunderbolt Drive, but not for the drive itself but because the case is actually fairly nice for passive cooling and supports better speeds than its native generic NVME drive. Thunderbolt cases were so expensive when I looked around for them a couple years ago that it was actually a better deal to get this option which had a "bonus" of a 1TB NVME drive. I don't know if they are still available.

 

[n8mac]

Ok thanks, i will look for that.