My macbook pro is actually a refurbished used model that was upgraded by an apple retailer. It has 4 gigs of ram and I don’t believe it has thunderbolt. I will try separate hard drives. All my apps are on the internal drive. I do have all my iTunes stuff on my internal drive on the macbook. would that slow anything down? I literally have over 25 Gigs of iTunes stuff. I will give a test of separate drives and see if it’s better.