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My MBP 15” late 2013 retina display is running latest Catalina 10.15.7 OSX and has MZ-JPU512T/0A6 disk, which is 512 GB PCI-e 2.0 SSD, and I’m going to buy ssd external disk to test upgrade to new OSX Big Sur. What kind of external disk do you suggest to buy ? What characteristics similar to internal drive? I thought to avoid NVMe technology; I’d like to but USB 3.0 disk with SATA interface. What do you think?
I personally like the Samsung T5 drives but that was quite a few years ago. Today I would go with the newer T7 drives. Samsung Portable SSDs: T5 vs. T7 vs. T7 Touch The issue you face is the interfaces your system series offers. The Thunderbolt 2 ports offer up to 20 Gbps I/O each and the USB-A ports up to 5 Gbps I/O each. The newer Thunderbolt 3 ports in the 2016 models onward offer up to 40 Gbps via USB-C connections. Even still having a fast interface on your system still is limited by the technology of the drive. A SATA based drive won’t be able to match the SSD’s speed, so I don’t think you’ll get the same performance. If you need something faster then you need a RAID setup using your Thunderbolt 2 port, sadly, the direction for most of the RAID systems is embracing USB-C or enterprise based connections which are just not portable.
