Was just gifted a few old iMacs, worth trying to upgrade?

[Tiangou]

PeterB wrote:
Hmmm, interesting. I'm wondering though if the cheapest/easiest solution might be to use an external SSD or even a flash drive?

How about something like one of these?:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CM8XN28G/
https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-512GB-Ult...083ZS4HYD/

NOPE.

Flash-profile SSDs are better/faster than regular flash drives for the most part, but they get super hot super quickly during data transfers and they slow down when they get hot. As an example, I just transferred a GB of files to a flash-sized SSD in a matter of a few seconds, but a 13GB macOS installer took 35 minutes. Read-operations are less of a problem, but you don't want to boot off of one of these drives on a daily basis.

And regular flash drives are just landfill.