MacOS – Boot from SD card

macbook promacossd cardstorage

Can I boot from SD card with speed 95MB/s and capacity 32GB on my MacBook Pro (early 2011)?

How fast it is?

Best Answer

Yes - I install restore images and emergency boot images on to SD cards as a matter of routine. You should have no problems booting from these storage SD cards due to the SD card or the OS itself.

They don't boot as fast as spinning hard drives in my experience as the cache there seems to do a better job than the controller on the cards. I generally get 60 MB/s or faster cards as they seem to be fast enough for the tasks I run.

Once the OS loads, it's quite snappy for normal use as the system RAM does a very good job of caching data for many aspects of normal operation. SD cards are a large step below SSD in terms of performance but they are substantially less expensive and designed for a different workload.

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