ext SSD for iMac - performance and backup

Question

PERFORMANCE: As I am looking to purchase my 1st iMac and looking to improve my new Mac performance.
I think i will get an external SSD and move all the boot system. I read something about TRIM as well but not ready sure about these concept in practice. I do not want to purchase the 765GB SSD for the new iMac 27". what is some good decent priced option?


BACKUP: As a wedding photographer who currently uses a windows pc thats rather old and uses normal single HDD as backup. External harddisk as a form of backup. What do you use? RAID-0? with stripped RAID? can you kindly point me to some reading for understanding these concepts?
i currently do have 3 x 1 TB HDD... i wish to my backup style for the new iMac.

Thank you.
Scott

Why not get the fusion drive instead of booting off an external.

thanks crn3371,
i dont trust the fusion drive. i prefer to go full SSD.

External SSD just sounds weird to me, and reduces reliability as it has extra power supplies and cables that can be kicked or fail. Can't you put it inside the machine? Other World Computing supplies this sort of thing.

SSDs aren't good for backup, they're an immature technology. Read my wedding workflow re backups. I suggest all images be kept on two spinning disks at all times, with one of them offsite. I don't use RAID, having two separate disks is better IMHO. RAID is not a backup. I actually have four copies of wedding photos (online, offline, offsite location 1, offsite location 2).

Not quite sure why you don't trust the fusion drive, sounds like the best of both worlds. Since Apple hasn't released the BTO options on the new iMacs it's hard to say exactly what your options are. You used to be able to order with 2 drives. A SSD boot drive with a HDD data drive. Fusion has most likely replaced this option. I would think you'd still have the option to order with something like a 256 SSD. External data drive, maybe. External boot drive, no.

MFG wrote in post #15193385
i dont trust the fusion drive. i prefer to go full SSD.

It is not something all that new, Hybrid drives have been around for sometime, usually as PCI add in cards with an SSD and Spinning disc mounted together.

They use software to allocate frequently used data to the SSD, which also acts as a cache for data being written to the spinning disc.
Fusion is simply Apples version of this, and it appears they have done a proper job.
People are already testing it on existing OS-X installs that have an SSD and HDD.

thanks. i might give the fusion a try.
tim, thanks for the link.

Moppie wrote in post #15196019
Fusion is simply Apples version of this, and it appears they have done a proper job.
People are already testing it on existing OS-X installs that have an SSD and HDD.

Here's a good read (and links) http://arstechnica.com …and-how-to-roll-your-own/

René Damkot wrote in post #15198007
Here's a good read (and links) http://arstechnica.com …and-how-to-roll-your-own/

Yes, it is very simple to make your own fusion drive (with OS X 10.8.2) and the performance is quite nice. I have detailed the instructions in another thread on the Mac mini.