External ssd for 2010 iMac?

[Anonymous]

I have two 27" iMacs:

The first one is a 2010 2.93 ghz Intel Core i& w/ 12g ram and a
ATI Radeon HD5750 1024 MB. 1T disc drive. It functions as the server.

The second one is a 5k 27" late 2015 4ghz Intel core i7 w/24 GB ram and an AMD Radeon R9 M395X 4096 MB. 500GB SSD drive

The newer one is obviously a lot faster, but I think much of the speed is due to the SSD drive on the newer one. I have searched around a bit, but has anyone used an external SSD drive as a start up drive on an older iMac like mine?

I need to wait on buying an new machine (hope they update the iMacs in the not too distant future) and thought that using a 250MB external SSD for start up and holding Archicad applications on the older iMac would help without going inside the iMac.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Is this setup hard to do?

thanks!

Don

[Anonymous]

Hi Karl:

After a lot of searching, I found this very detailed discussion on using an external SSD via Firewire 800. Lots of tech stuff and charts that I didn't wade through, but it generally said an external SSD would help a lot:
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/gonna-try-running-a-firewire-800-ssd-as-my-imac-boot-drive.2442...

I do think my old iMac has slowed a bit with use and does need to be cleaned up, beyond Disk Utility. Defraging is not generally needed (so I read) not he current OS systems. I would be interested in GS thoughts on this. I think that once the file is loaded onto the SSD drive where the OS and Archicad reside, things can move quickly. I have yet to do detailed renders on the SSD, so maybe the read and write speed back and forth to the main CPU is not as much of a factor.